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JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 



FEKRIS GREENSLET 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 



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COPYRIGHT 1905 BY FERRIS GRBENSLBT 
ALL RIGHTS RESBRVSD 

Published October igoj 






PEEFACE 

This attempt to present within the space of a 
single volume a comprehensive view of the life 
of Lowell and a consistent interpretation of his 
work is grounded largely upon printed sources. 
Chief of these is the admirable collection of 
his letters edited by Mr. Charles Eliot Norton. 
I have, indeed, endeavored to make Lowell, so 
far as possible, tell his own story, and be his 
own interpreter, in multitudinous short excerpts 
from his correspondence. I have quoted from 
the Letters with the permission of Harper & 
Brothers, proprietors of the copyright, my cita- 
tions being from the augmented edition issued 
in three volumes by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 
under arrangement with Harper & Brothers. 
Second only to the Letters as a storehouse of 
facts has been the elaborate Life in two volumes 
prepared by Horace E. Scudder. The records 
and impressions of Lowell by Mr. Howells, Mr. 
Henry James, Mr. A. Lawrence Lowell, Col. 
T. W. Higginson, Mr. G. E. Woodberry, and 



Ti PREFACE 

Dr. E. E. Hale have all been of considerable 
service ; while the two volumes of memorabilia 
by F. H. Underwood have been specially help- 
ful at many points. Other obligations will ap- 
pear in the text and will be duly acknowledged 
in foot-notes. From these various and often dis- 
crepant sources I have endeavored to mould a just 
impression of Lowell's life, modifying it or am- 
plifying it from fresh manuscript material when 
it could be found and Cantabrigian tradition 
when it could be trusted. I have everywhere 
tried to verify and vivify this impression by con- 
stant recourse to Lowell's own writings ; in this 
respect Lowell's commonplace books and note- 
books, which were placed in my hands by Mr. 
Norton, have been of the greatest assistance. 

As an exhaustive bibliography of Lowell's 
writings by Mr. George Willis Cooke is soon to 
be forthcoming, I have not thought it necessary to 
burden this volume with a necessarily less com- 
plete one. I have to thank Mr. Cooke for aid in 
clearing up one or two doubtful points of Lowell 
bibliography. For permission to print a few let- 
ters which appear for the first time in this book, I 
am indebted to the kindness of Messrs. Thomas 



PREFACE vii 

Bailey Aldrich, Francis J. Garrison, and James 
Loeb. It is a particular pleasure to express my 
obligation to Mr. Norton for much finely helpful 
talk and for other assistance of the most gener- 
ous and painstaking nature. 

Cambridge, May, 1905. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTBB PAGE 

I. The Youth OF A Poet. (1819-1839) 1 

1. Influences of Childhood. 

2. Education. 

3. Storm and Stress. 

II. Poet and Abolitionist. (1840- 

1853) ..... 35 

1. Early Ventures. 

2. Annus Mirabilis. 

3. Change. 

in. Professor AND Editor. (1854-1860) 105 

1. Dresden and Harvard. 

2. The Atlantic Monthly. 

IV. Public Man and Critic. (1861- 

1876) 146 

1. Lowell and the War of the Re- 

bellion. 

2. The North American Review. 

V. Diplomatist. (1877-1885) . . 184 

1. Spain. 

2. England. 

VI. Last Years. (1886-1891) . . 213 
Lowell the Man. 



X CONTENTS 

VII. Lowell's Poetry .... 245 

VIII. Lowell's Prose .... 266 

1. His Talk. 

2. His Letters. 

3. His Essays. 

4. Lowell as a Critic. 

Index 301 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 



CHAPTER I 

THE YOUTH OF A POET 

1819-1839 

Perhaps one may no more fitly begin the narra- 
tive of so fine yet so complex a life as Lowell's 
than by taking for his scripture his author's own 
ideal of biographical method and propriety. " I 
fancy an honest man," says Lowell in one place, 
"easier in his grave with the bare truth told 
about him on his headstone." Yet even a short 
biography, we may hope, is not precisely a head- 
stone, and even for it " the bare truth " is not 
quite enough. Writing in 1886 to Mr. Charles 
Eliot Norton concerning some of the difficulties 
that beset a biographer of Carlyle, Lowell him- 
self put this with characteristic vigor : " The 
main ingredient a biographer should contribute 
is sympathy (which includes insight). Truth is 
not enough, for in biography, as in law, the 
greater the truth sometimes the greater the 



2 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

libel." In a lecture upon Chapman delivered 
the same year he protests with a curious warmth 
of feeling against tlie gossips of biography, and 
lays down this suggestive article of biographical 
orthodoxy : — 

" Of course, in whatever the man himself has 
made a part of the record we are entitled to find 
what intimations we can of his genuine self, of 
the real man, veiled under the draperies of con- 
vention and circumstance, who was visible for 
so many years, yet perhaps never truly seen, 
obscurely known to himself, conjectured even by 
his intimates, and a mere name to all beside." 

There is little comfort here for the Mr. Giga- 
dibses of biography, and even less for Paul Pry 
with his artless pencil ; yet for a biographer of 
the third generation, wishing to write a " biogra- 
phy of the mind " of a man whom he never saw, 
it is reassuring. In this narrative of Lowell's 
life and study of his genius there will be little 
occasion to adduce any piece of " bare truth " 
that the man himself in his essays, his poems, 
and his letters^ has not made a part of the 
record. When we endeavor to add to our por- 
trait of his personality some analysis of the things 
that elemented it, we shall have perforce to turn 

^ A man's private letters are a doubtful part of his "re- 
cord," but when edited by so dear and discreet a friend as Mr. 
Norton, they may be reasonably so considered. 



THE YOUTH OF A POET 3 

to other records than his own, to follow faint 
clues and indirections from the lips and pens of 
others. Here again he would be a headstrong 
biographer, who — being familiar enough with 
Lowell's personality to bring any sympathy to 
its portrayal — could so run counter to the charm 
and potency of it as to use his gleanings of 
external fact in any other spirit than that fore- 
shadowed in the texts set down above. 

1. Influences of Childhood. 

Few poets — and for almost the half of his life 
our author was pure poet — ever came upon the 
world's stage among more fit surroundings than 
James Russell Lowell : few have been more tena- 
cious of home. Elm wood, the old house in which 
he was born and in which he was to die, was 
always for him the shrine and sanctuary of his 
deepest sentiment. Even to-day one cannot pass 
attentively through its wide rooms, and look from 
its windows, without seeing a greater part of the 
visible and material symbols about which Lowell's 
poetic imagination most habitually played. It is, 
therefore, not for nothing that the names of 
Lowell and Elmwood have come to have a certain 
mystic alliance in the minds of all American 
readers. 

The house was built, some years before the 
Revolution, for Thomas Oliver, who had inherited 



4 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

a fortune made in the West Indian trade, and 
married the daughter of Colonel John Vassall, 
one of the Royalist grandees of Cambridge. 
Oliver, who was something of an amateur poet, 
must have had a pretty eye for landscape, as well 
as a nice sense of the things that make for com- 
fort and dignity in a dwelling. He chose his site 
upon the slow-winding thoroughfare known as 
Tory Row, now Brattle Street, a mile from Har- 
vard College, the geographical and social centre 
of the town of Cambridge. The house was reared 
three square stories high, comfortably facing 
southeast by east ; and, for the further frustra- 
tion of the keen New England blasts, with blind 
walls of brick to the west and north. From the 
front windows one looked over the lane that led 
to the highway, across a stretch of pasture land, 
to the clustering elms and prim spires of the 
college town. On the right the smooth-sliding, 
circuitous Charles slipped through brown salt 
meadows to the sea. A mile back from its 
further shore the low curve of Corey's Hill gave 
a special touch of character to the view. Behind 
the house, a ten minutes' walk distant, lay the 
picturesquely bayed Fresh Pond, and beyond 
that stretched the wooded hills of Belmont and 
Arlington, and the pine-margined pastures of 
Lexington. 

Thomas Oliver, however, was soon compelled 



THE YOUTH OF A POET 5 

to absent himself from the felicity of this charm- 
ing and dignified abode. As lieutenant-governor 
of the Province and president of the council 
appointed by George III, he incurred the dis- 
pleasure of the more zealous patriots in his 
neighborhood. Early one morning in September, 
1774, Elmwood was surrounded by a consider- 
able company of Cantabrigians and Bostonians, 
who forced Oliver to sign his abdication. He 
complied, adding with something of a stoical hu- 
mor, " My house at Cambridge being surrounded 
by about four thousand people, in compliance 
with their demand I sign my name." He at once 
withdrew to Boston, whence, after serving as civil 
governor, he retired to Halifax with the British 
forces in 1776. 

For a time the brave old house knew vicissi- 
tudes. It was used as a hospital by the Amer- 
ican soldiers ; later the Committee of Corre- 
spondence was quartered there ; eventually it 
was confiscated by the Commonwealth and sold. 
After passing through the hands of two owners, 
— the second of them Elbridge Gerry, Governor 
of Massachusetts, Vice-President of the United 
States, and the great original of " gerryman- 
dering," — it was bought in 1818 by the Rev. 
Charles Lowell, of the West Congregational 
Church in Boston. After nearly ninety years it is 
still the property of the Lowell heirs. It stands 



6 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

to-day ever more and more nearly beset by the 
slighter dwellings of a later time, inscrutable, 
and a little ironical ; revisited, as some of its 
more imaginative occupants have believed, by 
the revenants of five generations. 

The Rev. Charles Lowell, who, with his wife 
and five children, established himself in the old 
Tory house in 1818, was a member of one of the 
oldest and best reputed families in the Common- 
wealth. Perceval Lowell, or Lowle, the first 
American settler of the name, migrated from 
Somersetshire to the Massachusetts Colony in 
1639. He was the author of some fluent but me- 
diocre memorial verses on the death of Governor 
Winthrop, whjch may still be seen in the Ap- 
I^endix to the " Life and Letters of Winthrop." 
He died in Newbury, Massachusetts, in 1665. 
After the lapse of three not particularly con- 
spicuous generations the Rev. John Lowell, born 
in 1704 and graduated from Harvard with the 
class of 1721, was a clergyman of some local dis- 
tinction. His son John, born in 1743, was of the 
Harvard class of 1760, and in social dignity 
ranked seventh, it is said, in its list of twenty- 
seven members. This John Lowell, the grand- 
father of our author, studied law, and was, 
throughout his life, prominent in the public busi- 
ness of the Commonwealth. He was an active 
leader in the Revolutionary movement. He was 



THE YOUTH OF A POET 7 

successively representative to the General Court, 
member of the convention for framing a state 
constitution, delegate to the Continental Con- 
gress, judge of the Admiralty Court of Appeals, 
one of the commissioners to establish the bound- 
ary line between New York and Massachusetts, 
and chief justice of the circuit court for the first 
circuit of Massachusetts. He was also a member 
of the corporation of Harvard College and one 
of the founders of the American Academy of 
Arts and Sciences. In Allen's old Biographical 
Dictionary, John Lowell was described as " unit- 
ing to a vigorous mind, which was enriched with 
literary acquisitions, a refined taste and concilia- 
tory manners ; being sincere in the belief and 
practice of the Christian religion." It was he 
who introduced into the Bill of Rights the clause 
abolishing slavery in Massachusetts. 

Charles Lowell, the father of our author, was 
the son of John Lowell by a third marriage. 
He was born in 1782 and graduated from Har- 
vard in 1800. After leaving college and trying 
his father's profession for a couple of years, he 
decided to enter the ministry, and enjoyed the 
advantage, none too common in those days, of 
three years of study abroad, chiefly under the 
great Dugald Stewart. In these years he had the 
acquaintance of Wilberforce and of other emi- 
nent and interesting men, and, in an excursion 



8 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

upon tbe Continent, saw Napoleon. When, in 
1805, he returned to become minister of the West 
Church in Boston, he brought with him some- 
thing of dignity, suavity, and lifted horizon, for 
which he was ever afterward admired and loved 
by his parishioners. 

The Rev. Charles Lowell's character and tem- 
perament are not hard to discover. Writing to 
C. F. Briggs in 1844, his son " Jemmy '' said of 
him, " He is Dr. Primrose in the comparative 
degree, the very simplest and charmingest of 
sexagenarians, and not without a great deal of 
the truest magnanimity." He seems to have 
possessed an oratorical temperament of the re- 
fined rather than of the coarser sort, and, in the 
pulpit, to have been more impressive from the 
earnestness and charm of his delivery than from 
the weight and originality of the things deliv- 
ered. He would seem to have been at his best 
in his daily pastoral care, and he was famous 
among his fellows as an example of affectionate 
fidelity to his flock. As was to be expected in a 
man of his character and training, his sympa- 
thies in politics and literature were largely con- 
servative and reactionary. Abolitionism was for 
him an eccentric crusade, and he esteemed Pope 
the best poet in the world. In religious faith, 
however, he was increasingly Unitarian, though 
he never left the orthodox Congregational fellow- 



THE YOUTH OF A POET 9 

ship. He was not remarkable for a sense of hu- 
mor ; and certainly he was, as his most brilliant 
son said of Browning's father, " permanently 
astonished at the fruit of his loins." ^ 

Curious inquirers into the intricacies of hered- 
ity will like to find something of the source of 
this astonishment at his children in the nature 
of their mother. 

In 1806 Charles Lowell married Harriet Traill 
Spence, an indirect cousin and a childhood's 
sweetheart. Both her father, Keith Spence, and 
her maternal grandfather, Robert Traill, were 
born in the Orkney Islands, and the imaginative 
Mrs. Lowell and her more imaginative son liked 
to trace their descent to persons no less porten- 
tous than Minna Troil and Sir Patrick Spens. 
At any rate, Mrs. Lowell possessed much of the 
wild beauty of the people of those windy north- 
ern isles, and her mind showed an irresistible 
tendency toward their poetic occultism. This 
tendency became irretrievably fixed by a visit 
which she made to the Orkneys in company with 
her husband early in their married life. Thence- 
forward until 1842, when her tense brain became 
disordered, she was a faerie-seer, credited by 
some with second sight. Like so many mothers 

^ A rather meagre and perfunctory memoir of Charles 
Lowell may be found in the Proceedings of the Massachusetts 
Historical Society , first series, vol. v. 



10 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

of English poets, she was much given to crooning 
old ballads in the twilight. Apart from this 
mystical strain in her nature, three points are, 
for our purpose, especially notable. Her family 
was Tory in its sympathy ; it was Episcopalian, 
where the Lowells were orthodox Congrega- 
tionalists, or Unitarians ; and there was a cer- 
tain dreamful languor in the blood that blent 
queerly with the characteristic Lowell effective- 
ness. Throughout his early life, whenever our 
author failed to do any of the things which, for 
his domestic or his .academic health, he should 
have done, the Lowell connection was prompt to 
attribute it to this deep quality, which they mis- 
called " the Spence negligence." ^ 

James Russell Lowell was born on the 22d 
of February, 1819, a year after his father with 
five elder children had established himself at 
Elmwood. He was born, as he liked half whim- 
sically to remind his friends, with a caul. Nor 
was his infancy, if we may credit family tradition, 
without other portents of fame. Throughout his 
childhood Mary Lowell, afterward Mrs. S. R. 
Putnam, his elder sister by nine years, was his 

1 There seems to have been two sides to this, for in 1884, 
Lowell, writing to Mr. Norton, refers to the " indolence (I 
know not whether to call it intellectual or physical) that I 
inherited from my father." But indolence is not quite the 
same thing as neg-lig-ence, and it may well be that in Lowell 
both dispositions met and mingled. 



It ) 



THE YOUTH OF A POET (11 

special mentor and confidante. The notes which 
she made of " Jemmy's " youth picture him in 
his earliest years as a highly imaginative boy, 
yet one remarkable for kindness and self-control. 
Lowell — like Milton, like Cowley, who was 
made by it "irremediably" a poet, and like 
Keats — first knew the spell of great literature 
from the " Faerie Queene." He was read to sleep 
from it, and very early began to amuse himself 
by retelling its episodes to his playmates. It is 
certainly not too fanciful to find in Lowell's 
youthful acquaintance with that long gallery of 
rich and varied pictures, echoing with sweet 
melodies, one cause of the direction of his earliest 
poetic endeavor. He had, too, even in those years, 
a markedly active visual imagination. Late in 
his life he related to Dr. Weir Mitchell how, 
in his childhood, his walks were constantly at- 
tended by mediaeval figures that were for him 
more real than living men. 

At best, however, these things are of the im- 
palpable stuff of dreams. They loom preternat- 
urally large through the mists of memory, and 
may easily lead a biographer too far afield. Look- 
ing at Lowell's childhood analytically, two influ- 
ences of the first significance are unmistakably 
discerned : his love of the outdoor world at Elm- 
wood, and his equally strong love for an indoor 
world of literature. 



12 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

Elm wood took its name from the row of stately 
English elms that guarded it, and early in his 
ownership Charles Lowell had set out with his 
own hands numerous specimens of that other 
tree beloved of our transcendental poets, the 
pine. This bowery loneliness that encircled the 
house proved marvelously attractive to birds of 
every sort, and it was in playing among the vocal 
thickets of his home that Lowell gained much of 
that intimate love and knowledge of trees and 
birds which informs some of his most purely 
poetic poetry. The best account of what this 
early love of nature did toward the shaping of 
his mind is to be found in some of his own later 
writings ; for it is surely true that as the serpent, 
according to the old mystic symbol of life, swal- 
lows more of his tail, the morning of life and 
its early prime are seen more and more in true 
measure and proportion. The familiar passage 
in *' The Cathedral," recounting a youth's 

<< Virginal cognitions, gifts of morn 
Ere life grow noisy," 

is quite certainly not dramatic but personal. Not 
even in the " Prelude " is there a more telling 
picture of a young poetic imagination — like 
Dyer's deathless lamb, who "feels the fresh world 
about him" — startled into intense life by the suc- 
cession of Nature's pure and thrilling moods : — 



THE YOUTH OF A POET 13 

" One spring I knew as never any since: 
All night the surges of the warm southwest 
Boomed intermittent through the wallowing elms, 
And brought a morning from the Gulf adrift, 
Omnipotent with sunshine, whose quick charm 
Startled with crocuses the sullen turf 
And wiled the bluebird to his whiff of song: 
One summer hour abides, what time I perched, 
Dappled with noonday, under simmering leaves, 
And pulled the pulpy oxhearts, while aloof 
An oriole chattered and the robins shrilled, 
Denouncing me an alien and a thief: 
One morn of autumn lords it o'er the rest. 
When in the lane I watched the ash-leaves fall, 
Balancing softly earthward without wind, 
Or twirling with directer impulse down 
On those fallen yesterday, now barbed with frost. 
While I grew pensive with the pensive year: 
And once I learned how marvellous winter was, 
When past the fence-rails, downy-gray with rime, 
I creaked adventurous o'er the spangled crust 
That made familiar fields seem far and strange 
As those stark wastes that whiten endlessly 
In ghastly solitude about the pole. 
And gleam relentless to the unsetting sun : 

Which I, young savage, in my age of flint, 
Gazed at, and dimly felt a power in me 
Parted from Nature by the joy in her 
That doubtfully revealed me to myself." 

Less elaborate, but no less suggestive and pic- 
turesque, is the bright glimpse we get of Low- 
ell's childhood in the anecdote he told in 18G5 



14 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

to Mr. Howells, who has set down with such 
delicate fidelity so many human glimpses of 
Lowell the man. When ''Jemmy" was but six 
his father had taken him on a brief journey; 
as they drove to the gate of Elmwood on their 
return, he said to him, as Lowell vividly remem- 
bered after forty years, " Ah, this is a pleasant 
place. I wonder who lives here, what little 
boy?" 

In the Rev. Charles Lowell's library were 
some 3000 or 4000 volumes, among which di- 
vinity was by no means paramount. As both 
Mrs. Lowell and Mary Lowell, in addition to 
their habit of singing and reciting poetry, were 
omnivorous readers, and had a turn for lan- 
guages,-^ the growing boy did not lack either the 
opportunity or the stimulus to make that early 
acquaintance with books as living, companion- 
able things that goes so far toward making a 
man a freeholder in the commonwealth of let- 
ters. In his earliest recorded letter there is an 
intimation that he had, too, that childish delight 
in the possession of the material body of a book, 
that so many ripe booklovers will mistily re- 
call : — 

1 In the Homes of American Authors, C F. Brig-g-s wrote of 
the latter, — it is to be hoped hyperbolically, — " She converses 
readily in French, Italian, German, Polish, Swedish, and Hun- 
garian, and is familiar with twenty modern dialects, besides 
Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Persic, and Arabic." 



THE YOUTH OF A POET 15 

January 25, 1827. 

My dear brother The dog and the colt 
went down today with our boy for me and the 
colt went before and then the horse and slay and 
dog — I went to a party and I danced a great 
deal and was very happy — I read French sto- 
ries — The colt plays very much — and follows 
the horse when it is out. 

Your affectionate brother 

James R. Lowell. 

I forgot to tell you that sister mary has not 
given me any present but I have got three 
books.^ 

A year after this he was eagerly reading 
Scott's novels, which were then in their first 
vogue. 

Before closing this necessarily too swift ac- 
count of the influences and forces that were at 
work in Lowell's childhood, two things remain 
to be set down. 

There is plenty of evidence that young Low- 
ell's so plastic and acquisitive mind received a 
deep coloring from the colonial and revolution- 
ary associations with which his home and his 
home village were saturated. To take a single, 
not too fanciful, instance : We know from Low- 
ell's own statement that in childhood he was 
1 Letters, vol. i, p. 8. 



16 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

deeply impressed by the painting of a group of 
old New England divines, each with his long 
church- warden pipe, which he had seen in his 
great-grandfather's house at Newbury, and 
which was later removed and placed over the 
mantel in his own study at Elmwood. It is for 
the psychologists to determine how far this vivid 
early image may have assisted that full visual- 
ization of old-time worthies that makes his 
" New England Two Centuries Ago " so con- 
vincing. Yet no one who has seen the quaint 
picture, and read his Lowell attentively, can 
doubt that there is "something in it." This 
sense of historical New England was solidified 
and extended by the frequent journeys which he 
took a-chaise with his father through eastern 
Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire. 

Finally, along with " gumbiles " and other 
maladies incident to childhood, we find that 
Lowell was disturbed by the youthful poet's cus- 
tomary precocious stirrings of sentiment. In a 
letter written at the mature age of eighteen ap- 
pears a passage that is not altogether whimsical, 
for Lowell was not quite the man to jest in such 
matters, — least of all in the years of his storm 
and stress : — 

" In common with Petrarch, Dante, Tasso, and 
Byron, I was desperately in love before I was 



THE YOUTH OF A POET @ 

ten years old. What pangs I have suffered my 
own heart, perhaps, only knows." ^ 

2. Education. 

Lowell learned his A B C's and other rudi- 
ments at a " dame school " in Cambridge. At 
the age of nine he was sent to the boarding and 
day school near his home kept by Mr. William 
Wells, an Englishman famous for the excellence 
of the Latin scholarship in which he instructed 
his boys, sometimes with the effectual aid of an 
ancient implement not recognized by the newer 
pedagogy. Among his schoolmates were W. W. 
Story and other likely boys who were to be his 
lifelong friends/ Of these school days no very sig- 
nificant external records are preserved, though 
Colonel T. W. Higginson, who was one of the 
younger boys at Mr. Wells's, remembers how 
Lowell and Story would reason boyishly together 
of the " Faerie Queene ; " and others recall the 
tall tales of wonder wherewith Lowell liked to 
widen the eyes of the smaller lads. Finally, who- 
ever would know with what gusto the budding 
humanist was tasting the quaint, diverse life of 
the old college town, has but to read the loving 
record which in 1 854 he addressed to the " Edel- 
mann Storg" (W. W. Story) in "Cambridge 
Thirty Years Ago." 

^ Letters, voL i, p. 23. 



18 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

When Lowell went, in 1834, from Mr. Wells's 
school to Harvard College, that institution num- 
bered some two hundred youth, instructed by a 
small body of professors, including a few men of 
real eminence, like Felton, Peirce, and Ticknor 
(succeeded by Longfellow in Lowell's junior 
year), and presided over by Josiah Quincy, whom 
he has memorialized in one of the most unerring 
of his essays as " A Great Public Character." 
The course of study in those days was of an in- 
credible rigidity, and the hard pursuit of Greek, 
Latin, and mathematics was broken by no more 
enlivening subsidiary studies than Paley's " Evi- 
dences," Butler's " Analogy," and a little of the 
modern languages. At first Lowell lived at 
home, but had a room near the college yard for 
study, and, we may believe, for conversation. 
Later on this was his regular abode. 

The nature of Lowell's development in the 
four years of his college course can be unmis- 
takably traced in his letters. It is a striking 
picture painted there of that 

" New England youth that seems a sort of pill, 
Half wish-I-dared, half Edwards on the WiU." 

He was a shy, yet not very tractable youth, given, 
like so many boys who are shy from excess rather 
than from defect of ability, to occasional violence 
and oddity of expression or act. Thus we find 



THE YOUTH OF A POET 19 

him habitually addressing one of his intimates 
as " dearest Shack," with a curious Platonic 
warmth now out of fashion among college boys, 
or recording a night spent in a graveyard " striv- 
ing to raise ghosts." 

Perhaps the most notable of all the phenomena 
adumbrated in Lowell's letters written in col- 
lege is the development in him of the habitude 
of the browsing, omnivorous reader. In the In- 
troduction to " Some Letters of Walter Savage 
Landor," written when Lowell was close to his 
threescore years and ten, he recalls how " in 
one of those arched alcoves in the old college 
library in Harvard Hall, which so pleasantly 
secluded without isolating the student," he made 
lifelong friendships with Landor, Dodsley's 
'' Old Plays," Cotton's " Montaigne," and Hak- 
luyt's " Voyages," among others that were not 
in his father's library. What some of these 
others were we discover from the letters ; it is 
an interesting list, suggesting the transitional 
taste of these not yet quite catholic days : it in- 
cludes — along with his old love, Spenser — 
Butler, Southey's " Doctor," Cowper, Beattie, 
Dante, Tasso, Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Carlyle, 
and Milton. Of the last he writes significantly : 
" By the bye, Milton has excited my ambition 
to read all the Greek and Latin classics which 
he did." Indeed, the two striking things about 



20 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

Lowell's miscellaneous reading in college, as it 
is seen reflected in his correspondence, are the 
exuberance of his intellectual curiosity and his 
fine sensitiveness to tone, to the voice-quality of 
books, which were, as we shall see, always his 
marked characteristics as a critic. 

A second notable trait of Lowell in his college 
days was his fervid and tempestuous sentiment. 
In part, no doubt, this was the fashion of the 
time ; for in the thirties America was just expe- 
riencing a resurgence of " sensibility " similar 
to that which had made England politely melt 
in tears nearly a century before. But in part, at 
least, it was intensely personal with Lowell. He 
writes to his " dearest Shack " that he likes best 
poetry that brings tears to his eyes, and again, 
at the end of his junior year, " Shack, pity me ! 
I am in love, and have been so for a long time, 
hopelessly in love." But even in these early let- 
ters we can see how Lowell's Wertherism was 
corrected by one of those temperamental anti- 
nomies that were always so marked, and some- 
times so puzzling, in him. In the most Wer- 
therian of his letters there is sure to be some 
picture of fresh outdoors, some piece of sportive 
humor, that lets a wholesome daylight in. 

This sportive, high-spirited humor is the most 
conspicuous quality of his literary ventures in 
college. As secretary of the Hasty Pudding 



THE YOUTH OF A POET 21 

Club, and later as one of the editors of *' Har- 
vardiana," the college magazine, Lowell turned 
out a great deal of writing in many veins. Fierce 
satires, and edifying essays there are in plenty, 
but these, despite their earnestness, have little 
to interest us beyond the special fluency of the 
rather tenebrous word-mongering common to 
undergraduate compositions in this kind. In the 
field of frank nonsense, on the other hand, he 
writes with a surprisingly attractive spontaneity, 
unction, and directness. So fertile was this vein 
that his very letters are full of it. How good in 
their young way, and how suggestive of later 
similar ebullitions, are these lines in the Burns 
stanza, to his friend G. B. Loring,i — 

" Having set Pegasus agoin', 
Wi' weel-nibb'd pen, and ink aflowin* 
While yet my rhymin' fit is growin*, 

I '11 stick it out 
An' let ye ken in stanzas glowin' 

What I 'm about. 

At present, then, your friend 's reposin* 

Upon a couch, his e'en half closin'. 

Sma', common minds wad think him dozin' 

Or aiblins fou,^ 
While a' the time he 's fast composin* 

These lines to you." 
* *' Aiblins " — ^n(7ftce, perhaps. " Fou," — corned. 

^ Letters, vol. i, p. 31. 



22 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

Lowell's sense of values was not such as to 
comport with the college standards of his time, 
nor were his genial avocations of various read- 
ing and versifying such as to induce the punc- 
tilious observance of academic routine. As time 
went on, the " Spence negligence " did its ap- 
pointed work. !By the end of his junior year he 
was causing his family some disquiet. In May, 
1837, his father, who was sailing with Mrs. Low- 
ell for a stay of three years in Europe, wrote 
from New York in anxious valediction : — 

" I shall direct Charles to pay you half a dol- 
lar a week. If you are one of the first eight 
admitted to <^. B. K., $1.00 per week, as soon as 
you are admitted. If you are not, to pay you 75 
cents per week as soon as you are admitted. If 
I find my finances will allow it, I shall buy you 
something abroad. If you graduate one of the 
first five in your class, I shall give you $100 on 
your graduation. If one of the first ten, $15, If 
one of the first twelve, $30, If the first or 
second scholar, |200. If you do not miss any 
exercises unexcused, you shall have Bryant's 
' Mythology ' or any book of equal value, unless 
it is one I may specially want." ^ 

Young Lowell, however, seems to have had 
no unbridled lust for Bryant's " Mythology." 
Throughout his senior year his unexcused absences 
1 Scudder, vol. i, p. 43. 



THE YOUTH OF A POET 23 

from recitations and chapel exercises increased 
in number until they reached a total that even 
now is startling to an academically trained 
reader. Finally, so the story runs/ there came 
a characteristic ebullition, during one of his in- 
frequent appearances at evening prayers, that 
brought matters to a head. Having been elected 
in the morning poet of his class, Lowell had spent 
the day in ambrosial jubilation. At prayers 
that evening, being still jubilant, he arose in his 
seat and bowed low to the right and to the left. 
Coming at the end of a long career of consistent 
negligence, this breach of decorum was not to 
be passed in silence. The faculty considered his 
case and passed the following resolution : — 

" 25 June, 1838. Voted that Lowell, senior, 
on account of continued neglect of his college 
duties, be suspended till the Saturday before 
Commencement, to pursue his studies with Mr. 
Frost of Concord, to recite to him twice a day, 
reviewing the whole of Locke's * Essay,' and 
studying also Mackintosh's ' Keview of Ethical 
Philosophy,' to be examined in both on his re- 
turn, and not to visit Cambridge during the 
period of his suspension." ^ 

On the whole, Lowell accepted his period of 

1 See T. W. Higg-Inson's Old Cambridge^ p. 157. This ver- 
sion of the affair is substantiated by an oi'al tradition. 
^ Scudder, vol. i, p. 48. 



24 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

Babylonish captivity very cheerfully. The Rev. 
Barzillai Frost, in whose custody he was placed, 
was a well-meaning young pedant who uncon- 
sciously afforded his young eaglet some amuse- 
ment, and Mrs. Frost, who seems to have been a 
sensible and kindly woman, did what she could 
to make his durance tolerable. He met Emerson, 
who had a decided kindness for him, and took 
him several times to walk ; though Lowell's sym- 
pathies were still too conservative, too alien from 
the Transcendental way of thought, for him to 
yield himself as yet unreservedly to the older 
man's influence. He wrote to his friends in Cam- 
bridge of both Emerson and Thoreau with a 
queer union of boyish liking, critical aloofness, 
and a disposition to mock. But his letters from 
Concord are chiefly filled with pretty descriptions 
of the Concord landscape, — which afterwards 
played a part in some of the more idyllic pas- 
sages in the " Biglow Papers," — with outbursts 
about a boyish love affair which he was just then 
taking very seriously, and with reports of his 
progress upon his class poem. This last occupa- 
tion was his chief interest during his rustication. 
Though he was not suffered to return to Cam- 
bridge until Class Day was past, when he came 
back to take his degree he had the poem privately 
printed for distribution among his friends and 
classmates. 



THE YOUTH OF A POET 25 

Save from book collectors and dealers in 
rariora, Lowell's " Class Poem " ^ has never had 
quite the close attention that it deserves. In 
vigor and variety it is a remarkable performance 
for a youth of nineteen, and it has many striking 
traits that foreshadow the quality of its author's 
mature work. Lowell's previous poetic ventures 
were shorter and slighter, tossed off in high 
spirits and a little time. But for the writing of 
this Class Poem he had two months of compara- 
tive leisure and isolation, in which he could en- 
deavor to get out the best and most sincere 
poetic stuff that was in him. He had, moreover, 
to aid him in its composition something of that 
sense of external occasion which was always to 
be the most efficient spur to his poetic genius. 

The first thing that strikes the analytical reader 
of the poem to-day is its metrical fertility and 
precision : Popian couplets, the octave stanza of 
Ariosto and Byron, swift -footed pairs of ana- 
paests, all are employed, and with a strikingly 
easy and correct mastery. The second thing to 
remark is the aristocratic and conservative bias 
of the satire. Young Lowell is still his father's 
son, and his grandfather's grandson, a true child 

^ Class Poem : — 

*' Some said, John, print it ; others said. Not so : 
Some said, It might do good j others said. No." 

Bunyan. 1838. 



26 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

of the old house which, as he said many years 
Later, " was born a Tory and will die one." From 
Aristophanes down the great satirists have been 
Tories, and have turned their points against inno- 
vation rather than against tradition. Here, for 
a time at least, Lowell in his youthful way was 
quite in the apostolic succession of satirists. The 
objects of his satire were Emerson ^ and Trans- 
cendentalism, Carlyle, Abolitionists, Temperance 
Agitators, Woman's Righters, and Vegetarians. 
In every case except the last the satire suffers 
from Lowell's inability to grasp, even intellect- 
ually, the case for the defense. On the milder 
vice of Vegetarianism, however, he is at his best, 
and we have a passage of excellent fooling, cul- 
minating in the young poet's expression of his 
surprise that certain of the meat-eating men 
of history have reached fourscore, — 

" In spite of all the meat and drink and mirth, 
Which had been preying on them from their birth." 

Yet even here there are foregleams of the pas- 
sionate sympathy with men which came to be the 
motive force of Lowell's later period of ardent 
abolitionism, and never ceased to mellow the 
conservatism of his last years. He pleads for 

1 Two weeks after the poem was printed Lowell sent it to 
Emerson with a very manly and rig-ht-spirited letter, asking 
him to believe that the satire was inspired by no personal 
animus. 



THE YOUTH OF A POET 27 

the misused Indians with a feeling quite other 
than that pensive poetic regret for their lot which 
Freneau had shown in his " Indian Burying 
Ground," and which had become a conventional 
poetic strain. In the temper of the poem, too, we 
find manifestations of that violent alternation 
of mood, the unmodulated transition from gay 
to grave, that Lowell was never quite able 
to control. He dwells upon the sad death of a 
classmate with an Euripidean insistency of sor- 
row that goes ill with the sportive context ; he 
would have gained in both pathos and poetry by 
a finer reserve. Finally, in the notes — elucida- 
tive, argumentative, analogical — which Lowell 
appended to the poem we find no uncertain pre- 
monition of that piece of Parson Wilbur in him 
which, fortunately for us, he was never wholly 
to lose. 

3. Storm and Stress. 

Lowell's first two years out of college were 
the most troubled and unhappy of his life. Yet, 
though they are not devoid of romantic incident 
and significant expression, it is possible to deal 
with them briefly, for while the happenings that 
occurred in them were momentous to him, they 
were not peculiar to him. They were, indeed, 
as he himself confessed late in his life, the fa- 
miliar phenomena which attach themselves to 



28 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

the spectacle of a youDg man of sensibility 
growing his shell. 

The external and exciting causes of Lowell's 
perturbations in these years were, as is usually 
the case, two : an unhappy love affair, and trou- 
ble in finding his true work. So early as 1837 
Lowell had become enamoured of a beautiful 
young woman of uncommon graces of mind, 
who was an intimate of the Lowell household. 
He seems to have pushed his boyish suit with 
all the ardor of his temperament, and, for a 
season, to have prospered in it. But about the 
time of his graduation a constraint of some sort 
arose between them. Whether Lowell's sense of 
the insecurity of his career tied his tongue, or 
whether some more subtle predicament of the 
fate that enmeshes young lovers involved him, is 
not clear. It is plain at any rate that Lowell 
considered his hopes irretrievably at an end. 
Thence onward for two years his letters constantly 
recur to this sorrow. Even allowing for the nat- 
tural dramatizing instinct of such a temperament 
as his, it is clear that the ground-swell of this 
gale of passion shook the very foundations of 
his life. Not until the true Juliet came did the 
regret for his Rosaline find surcease. 

The choice of a profession was for Lowell no 
easy matter. A love of preaching was in his 
blood, yet his father's profession was closed to 



THE YOUTH OF A POET 29 

him by liis inability to go all the way with the 
dogmas of any church. Literature, toward which 
all his inclinations tended, seemed scarcely to 
promise any consistent career and livelihood. At 
that time in America it was not recognized as a 
profession, and the shrewd practical difficulties 
which confront a young man deliberately choos- 
ing it to-day were a hundredfold greater in 
Lowell's time. Yet he felt strongly the obligation 
of self-support from the first ; and when in 1839 
his father lost most of his comfortable personal 
property under peculiarly distressing circum- 
stances and became " land-poor," this obligation 
grew imperative. Thus it came about that for 
five years, from 1837 to 1842, Lowell considered 
the law as his chosen pursuit/ 

In his last year at Harvard he writes to Shack- 
ford with his characteristic half-whimsical note 
that he intends to study law and " shall probably 
be Chief Justice of the United States." At his 
graduation he tried to obtain permission from his 
father to pursue his legal studies in Germany, 
wliither a few ambitious American youths were 
beginning to turn for a life that must have 
seemed, from the point of view of an American 
college of those days, rich in various interest and 
opportunity. Dr. Lowell, however, quite properly 
refused his consent, and a few weeks after the 
final exercises at Harvard we find our poet, like 



30 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

so many another, applying himself to Coke and 
Blackstone at the Dane College Law School. 

For nearly a year his letters are a record of 
vacillation. A month after he begins his law 
studies he decides to abandon them for business. 
Bat on his way into town to look for a place, he 
hears Webster make a speech in court, and forth- 
with returns to the law. Anon he has " quitted 
the law forever," and tries lecturing ; but after 
receiving four dollars, less expenses, for an ad- 
dress in Concord, and finding a few weeks of ser- 
vice as substitute clerk in a coal-dealer's office 
quite enough, he again buckles down to. his di- 
gests and commentaries. After a time, however, 
he " begins to like the law," and from the summer 
of 1839 onward he keeps to his studies with a 
fair diligence, though he confides to his friend 
Loring that he never expects to practice law as 
a profession. He has a feeling that he will do 
" something literary," and adds : '* If I don't 
marry — and I hardly think I shall — it will take 
but little to support me, and when I wanted a 
decent dinner I could go to one of my opulent 
friends." 

However mild and of the haec-olim-meminisse- 
juvabit order these woes may seem in the retro- 
spect, they were very real to Lowell. Disap- 
pointed love, and the sense of inability to find 
his work, coming together just as he was cut off 



THE YOUTH OF A POET 31 

from the so various and irresponsible interests of 
his college days, wrought in his yet ill-balanced 
temperament to give him moments of profound 
discouragement. There were times when the 
walls of his mind were wholly hung with black. 
Thirty years later he wrote : — 

" I remember in '39 putting a cocked pistol to 
my forehead and being afraid to pull the trig- 
ger." 

Yet even here, one suspects that it was not 
fear that intervened, but that invincible sense of 
humor which even in the most tragical of his let- 
ters rarely fails to give a pale flicker, and more 
often turns the whole to merriment at the end. 

Yet throughout those stormy and distressful 
years Lowell's character was ripening and his 
genius was taking its proper bent. The record of 
his reading is increasingly significant. He still 
considers Ovid " the most poetical of the Roman 
poets," doubtless because of the sentimentalism 
there is in him, yet his taste is obviously matur- 
ing. He buys and reads an anthology containing 
the work of Hesiod, Theocritus, and Moschus, 
with a Latin translation. He reads the Greek 
dramatists. Above all he reads with the keenest 
gusto the old English dramatists, "so nimble 
and so full of subtle flame," and the poetics of 
Sidney and Puttenham, and he fills his common- 



32 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

place book with pregnant passages. In January, 
1839, he writes to Loring that he is shaping his 
theory of poetry. 

The growth of Lowell's huraanitarianism in 
these two years is no less marked ; and this is 
important as showing that Lowell's humanita- 
rian impulses did not, as some have thought, all 
but wholly take their rise from his engagement 
to his first wife. His note-book for 1838-1839 
is full of passages about slavery, and so early as 
November, 1838, he writes, again to Loring, " I 
am fast becoming ultra-democratic ; " and of the 
Manchester riots, " It almost brings tears to my 
eyes when I think of this vast multitude starved, 
trampled upon, meeting to petition the govern- 
ment which oppressed them, and which they 
supported by taxes wrung out of the very chil- 
dren's life blood." At the end of the same letter 
he says, " The abolitionists are the only ones with 
whom I sympathize of the present extant par- 
ties." 

Lowell's study of literature and poetics, and 
his fast ripening humanitarianism, were accom- 
panied by a growing impulse towards poetic 
creation. Early in 1839 he writes to a friend, 
" I sometimes actually need to write somewhat 
in verse." He did write a rather copious some- 
what, with — as his letters show — a constantly 
increasing sense of the initial poetic impulse, as 



THE YOUTH OF A POET 33 

well as of control over his medium. In May, 
1839, he printed his " Threnody on an Infant," 
in the " Southern Literary Messenger," over the 
initials H. P. (Hugh Perceval). This was the 
first of the long series of poems that Lowell con- 
tributed to the *' Messenger," at that time the 
chief support of the nest of American singing 
birds, in those years so numerous and noisy. It 
is clear that actual poetic expression in public 
print was a great encouragement to Lowell, and 
did much to help him struggle out of the dark 
wood in w^hicli he had been astray. His letters 
begin at once to be full -of literary plans and 
proposals, and grow constantly happier and less 
subjective. 

It was not long, too, before he found — like 
others who have been astray in similar forests — 
a Beatific Lady to lead him finally to the high 
road of life. On December 2, 1839, Lowell 
wrote to Loring : — 

"... I went up to Watertown on Saturday 
with W. A. White, a classmate, and spent the 
Sabbath with him. You ought to see his father I 
The most perfect specimen of a bluff, honest, 
hospitable country squire you can possibly imagv 
ine. His mother, too, is a very pleasant woman 
— a sister of Mrs. Oilman. His sister is a very 
pleasant and pleasing young lady, and knows 
more poetry than any one I am acquainted with. 



34 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

I mean, she is able to repeat more. She is more 
familiar, however, with modern poets than with 
the pure well-springs of English poesy." 

A subtilely-inquiring mind will detect in this 
sudden warm interest in Mr. and Mrs. White 
symptoms of a more profound interest in that 
" pleasant and pleasing young lady," their daugh- 
ter. Lowell seems at once to have fallen deeply 
in love with Maria White. After an exalted 
wooing of some seven months, in the old house 
at Watertown, at Nantasket, at Cambridge, they 
became engaged in August, 1840, just as Lowell 
took his bachelor's degree in law. In Lowell's 
correspondence at this time everything is " glo- 
rious." A new Heaven and a new Earth lie 
open before him. He has at last pronounced the 
Everlasting Yea. 



CHAPTER II 

POET AND ABOLITIONIST 
1840-1853 

1. Early Ventures. 

With his engagement to Maria White in his 
twenty-second year, Lowell entered upon the 
first flowering time of his poetic life. It was to 
be nearly five years before the narrow circum- 
stances of the young couple would suffer them 
to marry ; but so close was the bond between 
them, and so intimate was their affection, that 
in considering the influence of Maria White in 
Lowell's career, the years of their engagement 
and the years of their married life together may 
be considered as one period. 

Maria White, by the testimony of all who 
knew her, and by the witness of the portraits 
which have been preserved, was a girl of deli- 
cate, pale beauty, and of a rare mind and char- 
acter. She possessed that quaint New England 
union of a transcendental exaltation of mood 
with shrewd domestic wisdom that was so often 
seen among the liegemen and liegewomen of 



36 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

Emerson. Like most young persons in those 
(lays, she wrote poetr}^ but of a vastly better 
fibre than the generality. The slender volume of 
her selected verse which was privately printed 
by Lowell in 1855, two years after her death, 
reveals the qualities of mind which proved so 
stimulating and supporting to her poet-lover. 
All of her verse has the simple and unlabored 
accent which gives distinction ; yet along with 
the customary transcendentalism of those times, 
it is informed with a strain of fantastic sombre 
imagination that queerly recalls the visions of 
Beddoes and James Thomson. The reader who 
goes to her verse to-day will find in it not a few 
images as memorable as that wherewith she con- 
cludes her poem entitled " Africa," in which the 
dark continent is symbolized as a great black 
figure of eternal sadness : — 

" Her great lips closed upon her moan; 
Silently sate she on her throne, 
Rigid and black as carved in stone." 

She had, too, an odd vein of musical phantas- 
magoria that suggests her reading of Coleridge 
and De Quincey. Her " Opium Phantasy," with 
its recurrent motif, — 

" Like silver balls, that, softly dropped, 
Ring into Golden Bowls," 

has the true drowsy magic. 



POET AND ABOLITIONIST 37 

It is impossible to doubt that the inclination 
of his lady toward glamourie and mystical im- 
agery fostered that bent in the same direction that 
Lowell had received from his mother. But this 
is only a minor matter, compared with the resur- 
gence of trust in his own powers which came to 
him from the worshipful love of so rare a woman. 
How high was her faith in him, and how great 
were the emprises to which she urged him, may 
be seen in such lines as these from one of her 
sonnets : — 

" I love thee for thyself — thyself alone; 
For that great soul whose breath most full and rare 
Shall to humanity a message bear, 
Flooding their dreary waste with organ tone." 

Scarcely less potent than the influence of 
Maria White herself upon Lowell's mind was 
that of the curiously compact group of young 
people, self-styled " the Band," to which she in- 
troduced him. In the life of the Band, the ele- 
ments of " wish-I-dared " and " Edwards-on-the- 
Will," to which reference has already been made, 
were about equally mingled. Wholly to grasp the 
temper of the Band, it is important to realize the 
mood of that eager transcendental time. This is 
nowhere better presented than in that engaging 
picture of it as it seemed to Lowell's riper vision 
in his essay on Thoreau : — 

" Ecce nunc tempus acceptahile ! was shouted 



38 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

on all hands with every variety of emphasis, 
and by voices of every conceivable pitch, repre- 
senting the three sexes of men, women, and Lady 
Mary Wortley Montagues. The nameless eagle 
of the tree Ygdrasil was about to sit at last, and 
wild-eyed enthusiasts rushed from all sides, each 
eager to thrust under the mystic bird that chalk 
egg from which the new and fairer Creation was 
to be hatched in due time. Medeunt Saturnia 
regna^ — so far was certain, though in what 
shape or by what methods was still a matter of 
debate. Every possible form of intellectual and 
physical dyspepsia brought forth its gospel. 
Bran had its prophets, and the presartorial sim- 
plicity of Adam its martyrs, tailored impromptu 
from the tar-pot by incensed neighbors, and sent 
forth to illustrate the ' feathered Mercury,' as 
defined by Webster and Worcester. Plainness 
of speech was carried to a pitch that would 
have taken away the breath of George Fox; 
and even swearing had its evangelists, who 
answered a simple inquiry after their health 
with an elaborate ingenuity of imprecation that 
might have been honorably mentioned by Marl- 
borough in general orders. Everybody had a 
mission (with a capital M) to attend to e very- 
body-else's business. No brain but had its pri- 
vate maggot, which must have found pitiably 
short commons sometimes. Not a few impecu- 



POET AND ABOLITIONIST 39 

nious zealots abjured the use of money (unless 
earned by other people), professing to live on 
the internal revenues of the spirit. Some had an 
assurance of instant millennium so soon as hooks 
and eyes should be substituted for buttons. 
Communities were established where everything 
was to be common but connnon sense. Men re- 
nounced their old gods, and hesitated only 
whether to bestow their furloughed allegiance 
on Thor or Budh. Conventions were held for 
every hitherto inconceivable purpose. The be- 
lated gift of tongues, as among the Fifth Mon- 
archy men, spread like a contagion, rendering 
its victims incomprehensible to all Christian 
men; whether equally so to the most distant 
possible heathen or not was unexperimented, 
though many would have subscribed liberally 
that a fair trial might be made. It was the 
Pentecost of Shinar. The day of utterances re- 
produced the day of rebuses and anagrams, and 
there was nothing so simple that uncial letters 
and the style of Diphilus the Labyrinth could 
not turn it into a riddle. Many foreign revolu- 
tionists out of work added to the general mis- 
understanding their contribution of broken 
English in every most ingenious form of frac- 
ture. All stood ready at a moment's notice to 
reform everytluDg but themselves. The general 
motto was : — 



40 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

* And we '11 talk with them, too, 
And take upon 's the mystery of things 
As if we were God's spies.' " 

This welter of the " New Thought " that then 
was represents the mood of the Band but 
roughly. They were too youthfully gay, too 
earnest for the actual best in literature and life, 
to go very far with its vagaries ; yet their young 
dreams and ambitions were clearly colored by it. 
Miss White's beauty and Lowell's own, — he is 
described at that time as " slight and small, with 
rosy cheeks and starry eyes and wavy hair parted 
in the middle," — together with the growing 
repute of his poetry and the romantic dignity of 
their love affair, — made them prominent figures 
in the circle, and to the sympathetic, intense, 
slightly fevered thrill of the Band Lowell's ex- 
citable genius owed an intense activity. 

The first beneficent result of Lowell's associa- 
tion with the Band was to afford him an appre- 
ciative audience for his high-spirited wit, and 
thus to help him still further out of the shadows 
in which he had been living for three years, by 
encouraging him to give free rein again to 
those incredibly boyish ebullitions of fun which 
were to be throughout his life both his blessing 
and his bane. His early letters are full of the 
joy of this joking. He writes, for example, in 
December, 1841, to W. A. White : — 



POET AND ABOLITIONIST 41 

" I have just come from spending the evening 

at 's (where Maria is making sunshine just 

now), and have been exceedingly funny. I have 
in the course of the evening recited near upon 
five hundred extempore macaronic verses ; com- 
posed and executed an oratorio and opera (en- 
tirely unassisted and, a la Beethoven, on a piano 
without any strings, to wit the centre table) ; 
besides drawing an entirely original view of 
Nantasket Beach with the different groups from 
Worrick's disporting themselves thereon, and a 
distant view of the shipping in the harbor, com- 
piled from the shipping news of our indefati- 
gable friend Ballard, of the ' Daily,' and making 
a temperance address ; giving vent, moreover, 
to innumerable jests, jokes, puns, oddities, quid- 
dities, and nothings, interrupted by my own 
laughter and that of my hearers ; and eating an 
indefinite number of raisins, chesnuts (I advisedly 
omit the ' t '), etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., 
etc., etc., . . ." ^ 

The second beneficent influence of the Band 
upon Lowell came from the opportunity which 
it gave him to enlarge upon his literary likings 
and plans to a sympathetic and admiring circle. 
A member of the Band has recorded, for instance, 
that for many months Lowell could talk of little 
save Shakespeare's sonnets, which he read ill 
1 Letters, vol. i, p. 79. 



42 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

but impressively. It is not perhaps necessary 
for us to take the "ill" very seriously, for there 
are few men of sensibility who fancy another 
man's manner of cantillating verse, but it is easy 
to appreciate how much this communication in 
bee-bread contributed to his poetic growth. Per- 
haps the chief favorites of the Band were Keats 
and Tennyson. Lowell's letters at this time are 
full of Keats, whom he considers " one of the old 
Titan brood," and there has recently come to 
light a manuscript volume in Lowell's hand con- 
taining some of the early poems of Tennyson, 
which seems to have been passed about among 
the members of the Band. 

But while these interesting young people rea- 
soned together of poetry, they certainly did not 
neglect the verses of their king and queen, and 
the effect of this genial and responsive atmos- 
phere is clearly seen in the sudden exuberance 
of Lowell's literary plans. Throughout these 
years he is continually writing to his friends, 
with something a little like braggadocio, that he 
does not need sympathy. Thus he sa3^s in 1842 : 
" I do not need it [encouragement] having been 
always blessed with a self-sustaining nature " — 
and a few years later : — "I am tei'cs atque to- 
tundus^ a microcosm in myself, my own author, 
public, critic, and posterity, and care for no 
other." But this is rather the half-willful self-de- 



POET AND ABOLITIONIST 43 

ception of a sensitive nature than a true expression 
of the facts of his mind. Reading his letters of 
that time one discovers in ahnost every line of 
them evidence of his dependence upon the en- 
couragement and sympathy of Maria White and 
the Band, and of the impulse he derived from 
them. In 1840 he is going to write a traged}^ — 
" psycho-historical I think — / hnow it will be 
good ; " — also a prose tale — a kind of Canta- 
brigian " Sorrows of Werther " for serial publi- 
cation in the " Messenger ; " and he writes to 
Loring, '' If I don't die, George, you will be 
proud of me." A year later he is ''going to 
write an American tragedy on the trial of Anne 
Hutchinson, who was condemned for heresy in 
the good old colony times," and we hear of a life 
of Keats among multitudinous other ventures, 
— which were never to be anything else than the 
numerous dream-progeny of his brain. 

The third and most important beneficent 
influence of the Band upon Lowell's life was in 
quickening, deepening, and defining his human- 
itarian impulses. In this direction, of course, it 
but seconded and supported the influence of Maria 
White. But a sense of the fellowship of ideals 
which came to Lowell from the sympathy of the 
circle seems to have solidified his impulses in a 
way that would scarcely have been possible from 
the inspiration of a single girl, even were she so 



44 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

remarkable a person as Miss White. As we have 
already seen, Lowell's abolitionism did not begin 
wholly with his engagement ; but it certainly 
took no form more definite than a somewhat 
vague velleity until the summer and fall of 1840. 
Indeed it could not well have been otherwise, for 
only through some profound emotional experi- 
ence could a Lowell become heartily allied with 
a movement apparently so quixotic as the anti- 
slavery cause was in the last years of the '30's, — 
the years within which Whittier was mobbed at 
Concord, New Hampshire, and Garrison was still 
a young man, " friendless and unseen." 

By the autumn of 1840, however, Lowell was 
generally known to be a whole-hearted adherent 
of the abolition cause. It was apparently about 
that time that he wrote upon the cover of the 
class poem in which he had so gayly derided the 
abolitionists : — 

" Behold the baby arrows of that wit 
Wherewith I dared assail the woundless Truth ! 
Love hath refilled the quiver and with it 
The man shall win atonement for the youth." 

And in November, 1840, he was a member of the 
Chardon Street Anti-Slavery Convention. From 
this time on his poems and his letters are full 
of the slavery question. The most significant 
utterances are to be found in his letters to his 
Virginian friend and classmate, Frank Heath, 



POET AND ABOLITIONIST 45 

a young man of unusual personal charm and ac- 
complishment, whose extraordinary abilities were 
a tradition among his old Cambridge circle long 
after he had disappeared from their sight. Lowell 
writes to him very earnestly and at great length 
trying to persuade him to join the anti-slavery 
ranks. To the Virginian Lowell's logic must 
have seemed less convincing than the feeling 
which lay under it, for as a dialectician Lowell 
in those days was not at his best. Toward the 
close of one of his letters to Heath he breaks 
out : " I cannot reason on the subject. A man 
who is in the right can never reason. He can 
only affirm ; " and again : " My heart whirls and 
tosses like a maelstrom when I think of it." 

The momentum of Lowell's new love-born hu- 
manitarianism urged him into other reforms of 
which a few years before he had been the deri- 
sive satirist. He even appears, somewhat oddly, 
considering his earlier and later views, in the 
role of a temperance lecturer and advocate of 
women's suffrage. Writing to Loring in July, 
1842, he gives a curious account of a presenta- 
tion by Miss White of a banner to the " Water- 
town Washington Total Abstinence Society," 
and of his own remarks before the Cambridge- 
port Woman's Total Abstinence Association 
upon a similar occasion : — 

" I was called out, and made a speech of about 



46 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

ten minutes on the top of a bench to an audience 
of two thousand, as silent as could be. I spoke 
of the beauty of having women present, and of 
their influence and interest in reforms, I ended 
with the following sentiment, * The proper place 
of woman at the head of the Pilgrims back to 
Purity and Truth.' In the midst of my speech I 
heard many demonstrations of satisfaction and 
approval — one voice saying ' Good ! ' in quite an 
audible tone. I was told that my remarks were 
' just the thing.' When I got up and saw the 
crowd it inspired me. I felt as calm as I do now, 
and could have spoken an hour with ease. I did 
not hesitate for a word or expression even once." ^ 
It is clear from such records as this that Low- 
ell's democratic sympathies, as well as the char- 
acter of his new friends, were separating him 
slowly yet perceptibly from the " Brahmin " caste 
to which by inheritance he belonged. Yet his 
taste and culture were always marked by some- 
thing of the old school. Hence arose a division 
and conflict in his interior as well as exterior 
life, with results which were, as we shall see, not 
always happy for his natural development. 

Finally, in considering young Lowell's inner 
life as it was affected by his engagement, his as- 
sociation with the Band, and his growing poetic 
impulse, we must note the peculiar development 
i Letters, vol. i, p. 91. 



POET AND ABOLITIONIST 47 

in him at this time of a conscious mysticism. 
Writing to Heath of the insidious corruption of 
sensualism, he says significantly: "The body 
never thickens outward^ but always inward." 
And Lowell himself seems at this time to have 
been much concerned to prevent in his own case 
the inward thickening of the flesh. This could 
not have been a very bitter fight for a young 
man of Lowell's nature and intellectual consti- 
tution, who, at the age when most poets are hav- 
ing their taste of la vie de Boheme or else under- 
going the rigors of a half-monkish retirement, 
was engaged to a noble woman, and bound in a 
fellowship of humanitarian ideals to a band of 
young New England men and maidens. But 
whatever the fight may have been, he was helped 
in it by a succession of those experiences of " gus- 
tation " and ecstasy wherewith so many poets and 
mystics have believed themselves to be blessed. 
Lowell's own account of this sheds too clear a 
light upon the character of his imagination to be 
passed over. Writing to Loring in September, 
1842, he thus describes one of the first of these 
experiences : — 

*' I had a revelation last Friday evening. I 
was at Mary's, and happening to say something 
of the presence of spirits (of whom, I said, I was 
often dimly aware), Mr. Putnam entered into an 
argument with me on spiritual matters. As I 



48 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

was speaking the whole system rose up before 
me like a vague Destiny looming from the abyss. 
I never before so clearly felt the spirit of God in 
me and around me. The whole room seemed to 
me full of God. The air seemed to waver to and 
fro with the presence of Something, I knew not 
what. I spoke with the calmness and clearness 
of a prophet. 

" I cannot tell you what this revelation was. 
I have not yet studied it enough. But I shall 
perfect it one day, and then you shall hear it and 
acknowledge its grandeur. It embraces all other 
systems." ^ 

In one of Lowell's note-books, apparently that 
for 1842, there is a faintly penciled line that 
cries from the blurred page with a startling vehe- 
mence, " My heart beats like the trampling of a 
host." There speaks the real Lowell of those 
early years. 

But we have paused perhaps too long over the 
momentous impulses that were moving in Low- 
ell's mind in the two years from 1840 to 1842. 
It is time to return and take up again the narra- 
tive of the external events of his life. When in 
1840 young Lowell attained his majority, took 
his bachelor's degree in law, and contracted an 
engagement of marriage, his prospects were far 

1 Letters, vol. i, p. 96. 



POET AND ABOLITIONIST 49 

from bright, and for the four years following his 
struggle for self-support was too keen to make it 
possible for him to entertain the idea of marriage. 
After completing his course at the Law School, 
he entered the law office of Mr. C. G. Loring in 
Boston, and soon went into town to live. Though 
he seems to have had an impecunious client or 
two, his career as a barrister was quite tradition- 
ally briefless, and he employed himself during 
office hours chiefly in writing verse. Throughout 
1840 he had been a frequent contributor in verse 
to the " Southern Literary Messenger," which, 
unfortunately, did not pay for poetical contribu- 
tions. Now he looked about for a more profitable 
market, and in 1841 began to send verse to 
" Graham's Magazine," which paid him a small 
but very acceptable honorarium. In this year, 
too, partly to please himself, partly to please and 
surprise his father, but more largely to make a 
fit offering to Miss White, he signalized the be- 
ginning of his practice at the bar by publishing a 
volume of verse. 

" A Year's Life " appeared with the familiar 
motto, "Ich babe gelebt und geliebet," upon the 
title-page, in the late autumn of 1840, though it 
bears the date 1841. Of the poetic achievement 
of this volume there will be occasion to speak 
further on. Its actual poetic substance was not 
very great, and of the poems in the volume there 



50 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

were but a mere handful that Lowell ever cared 
to reprint. It was full of his deep mystic joy in 
his love, of that renascence of wonder at the 
various world of which Lowell was one of the 
chief representatives in America, of beautiful if 
somewhat nebulous images, and there were in it 
numerous traces of his new dream of human 
brotherhood. Two of the poems, " Irene," and 
*' My Love," were poetry of the first water. In 
their twofold inspiration, Lowell's love for Maria 
White and his reading of Jeremy Taylor's ser- 
mon in praise of the Countess of Carberry, they 
were typical of the mingled passion and bookish- 
ness of all of his best poetry. But Lowell in 
1840 was as yet an imperfect and intermittent 
master of his art. Although the reader is con- 
stantly aware of the inspiration of the author, 
his poetic moods are but ineffectively mediated, 
and we bring away from the volume only an im- 
pression of wandering airs and a memory of star 
dust. 

For all that, the volume was, as volumes of 
verse went in those days of sentimentality and 
facile singing, a notable one. The prismatic mist 
in which the reader of it found himself was not 
unlike that which envelops one in the early 
poems of Tennyson and of Shelley, though 
Lowell nowhere in it showed quite the subtle 
artistry of the one, or the fervid, consistent 



POET AND ABOLITIONIST 61 

Utopianism of the other. If in one sense it was 
an esoteric book for the lover, his lady, and the 
Band, in another it was a significant expression 
of the mood of those times in New England. At 
any rate, it was praised without reserve by 
friendly reviewers. " Graham's Magazine " hailed 
the author as the herald of a new school, at once 
"humanitarian and idealistic." Nor was the 
poetic repute that came to Lowell after the pub- 
lication of this volume confiined to the circle of his 
literary acquaintance. So active were his friends, 
indeed, that he was, as Willis said, " the best 
launched poet of his time ; " and he seems to 
have enjoyed an immediate prestige that few 
poets achieve. When he was known only by this 
first volume and a few magazine poems, Bayard 
Taylor, then but seventeen and remote from the 
Cambridge circle, was "enthusiastic" over him, 
and a little later the " New York Tribune " said 
of him that he was " well and widely known as 
one of the most gifted and promising poets in 
America." 

However, but a few hundred copies of "A 
Year's Life " were sold, and the proceeds from its 
sale, with the addition of an occasional honora- 
rium for a poem in " Graham's," did not go very 
far toward Lowell's support. He cast about for 
other markets. In May, 1842, he printed in " The 
United States Magazine and Democratic Ee- 



52 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

view" the six characteristic sonnets, afterwards 
reprinted as " On Reading Wordsworth's Son- 
nets in Defence of Capital Punishment." For the 
" Dial " he wrote three sonnets over his initials, 
" The Frankness of Nature," " The Poet's Obe- 
dience," and " To Irene on Her Birthday ;" and 
possibly two other sonnets signed Hugh Peters 
may be his. But the "Boston Miscellany," 
edited by Nathan Hale, who had been his youth- 
ful associate in the editorship of " Harvardiana," 
was for a year his chief medium of publication. 
To the " Miscellany " Lowell contributed a few 
poems, among them the fine ode beginning " In 
the old days of awe and keen-eyed wonder," and 
a considerable number of prose pieces, which, 
without possessing much permanent merit, are 
of uncommon interest as the first specimens of 
his production in the form by which he is now 
perhaps most commonly remembered. The va- 
riety of these papers is considerable. There are 
several slight, fantastic sketches, " The First 
Client," " Married Men," " Getting Up," " Dis- 
quisition on Foreheads," ^ which show a pleasant 
vein of discursive humor and sentiment in the 

^ In Lowell's note-book for 1841-42 there are suggestions 
for other essays, which, if written, would doubtless have gone 
with this group. Some of the more suggestive titles are : An 
Essay on the Philosophical Causes of the Fact that Italians al- 
ways Suffer in Convulsions of Nature^ An Essay on Owls, and A 
Parody on Romantic Stories. 



POET AND ABOLITIONIST 53 

manner that was then in vogue ; but these are 
more remarkable for the easy copiousness of their 
production than for any perdurable quality. The 
literary essays, on the other hand, have more 
significance. There are four essays upon the Eliz- 
abethan dramatists, Chapman, Webster, Ford, 
and Massinger, which show how keen at this 
time was Lowell's taste for those brave translu- 
nary things which were all his life his favorite 
reading. He gives little attention to the criti- 
cism of dramatic structure, or to the more ideal 
implications of tragic meaning. The essays are 
very largely made up of quotations from the 
authors under discussion, surrounded by enthu- 
siastic exposition and appreciation ; but the ex- 
tracts are always chosen with excellent taste, 
and Lowell's gift for transmitting to the reader 
a lively sense of the author's personality is very 
clearly shown. Perhaps the best of the four is 
the paper on Chapman, which contains a notable 
plea for calling things by their right names, — a 
spade a spade, etc. This was always a way of 
Lowell's, but his plea was particularly apt at 
that time when it was but a step from the labored 
and ostentatious frankness of the new thinkers to 
preciosity and timorous periphrase ; when Helen 
Maria Williams, for example, spoke of the 
Church of Kome as the " dissolute of Babylon ; " 
and when Lowell's ears must have been daily 



64 JAMES KUSSELL LOWELL 

provoked by a kind of mincing in linguistic mat- 
ters which is still not unknown in newer Boston. 
But more interesting than any of Lowell's pa- 
pers in the " Miscellany " is that on Song- Writing, 
written about this time and published the follow- 
ing February in the second number of " The Pio- 
neer." Here we find something very unlike this 
plea for plain speech, which again discloses that 
characteristic duality in his nature which we shall 
never cease to observe. Lowell's theory of song- 
writing is informed by a kind of mystic human- 
ism which sometimes scatters into a misty cataract 
of words, but it is full of paragraphs that reveal 
the heart of the young poet better, perhaps, than 
anything to be found elsewhere in his early 
prose, not even excepting his intimate letters. 
How clearly, for example, do we get the quality 
of his mind in such sincere, highflown passages 
as this : " We love to hear wonderful men talk 
of themselves because they are better worth 
hearing about than anything else, and because 
what we learn of them is not so much a history 
of self as a history of nature." Or this, which is 
still nearer, as some may think, to the intense 
inane : " True poetry is but the perfect reflex 
of true knowledge, and true knowledge is spirit- 
ual knowledge, which comes only of love, and 
which, when it has solved the mystery of one, 
even the smallest effluence of the eternal beauty, 



POET AND ABOLITIONIST 65 

which surrounds us like an atmosphere, becomes 
a clue leading to the heart of this seeming laby- 
rinth." Yet in all these Platonic flights, Lowell 
is constantly returning, as was the wont of the 
Transcendentalists, to his actual New England 
world. We have as the application of the passage 
just quoted this charming sentence, which he 
was afterward to make use of in " The Courtin','' 
perhaps the most nearly perfect of his poems : 
'^ The modest loveliness of Dorcas has revealed 
to the heart of Reuben countless other beauties 
of which, but for her, he had been careless." 

It is clear from what we have seen of Lowell's 
mood in these years, as it was determined by his 
love and by his friendships, as it found expres- 
sion in his verse and in his prose, that he was in 
no way to succeed as a lawyer. He felt more 
and more the restraint of his cribbed and cabined 
position, and in the autumn of 1842 he at last 
made up his mind to abandon it. As he wrote, 
" I cannot write well here in this cramped up 
lawyer's office, feeling all the time that I am 
giving the lie to my destiny and wasting time 
which might be gaining me the love of thou- 
sands." At the end of 1842 he forsook the law, 
this time indeed forever, and undertook the peril- 
ous adventure of founding the great American 
magazine. 



56 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

The particular great American magazine that 
Lowell undertook to launch was " The Pioneer." 
He associated with himself in the enterprise Mr. 
Robert Carter, a young man of Cambridge, who 
had already had some slight experience in news- 
paper and magazine work, and the two undertook 
to be both editors and proprietors of a periodical 
which should be at once the most intellectual 
and the most readable that America had seen. 
" The Pioneer" was to be published for the propri- 
etors by Leland & Whiting of Boston, to whom 
they contracted to furnish five thousand copies 
on the 20th of each month, under penalty of a fine 
of five hundred dollars in case of failure. The 
prospectus of " The Pioneer," written doubtless 
by Lowell, is highly characteristic. Witness 
this paragraph : — 

" The object of the subscribers in establishing 
' The Pioneer ' is to furnish the intelligent and 
reflecting portion of the reading public with a 
rational substitute for the enormous quantity of 
thrice-diluted trash in the shape of namby-pamby 
love tales and sketches which is monthly poured 
out to them by many of our popular magazines, 
— and to offer instead thereof a healthy and 
manly Periodical Literature, whose perusal will 
not necessarily involve a loss of time and a 
deterioration of every moral and intellectual 
faculty. 



POET AND ABOLITIONIST 57 

" The critical department of ' The Pioneer * 
will be conducted with great care and impartial- 
ity, and while satire and personality will be sed- 
ulously avoided, opinions of merit or demerit 
will be candidly and fearlessly expressed." 

Whoever has had the curiosity to peruse any 
volumes of " Gleason's Pictorial Fireside Com- 
panion " or " Godey's Lady Book," perhaps two 
of the most popular magazines of those days, will 
appreciate the peculiar merit of this prospectus. 
Lowell's hopes for the magazine were high, and 
he had that dream of making it an institution 
rather than a business which has brought so many 
brave editorial argosies to wreck. He vn^ote to 
Whittier : " If the undertaking succeeds, I shall 
pay authors higher than any other magazine in 
the land, regarding things and not names, and 
paying for an article's worth in spirit rather than 
its current value in specie." 

The first number of " The Pioneer " appeared 
in January, 1843, with a motto from Bacon : 
" Reform, therefore, without heresy or scandal 
of former times and persons ; but set it down to 
thyself as well to create good precedents as to 
follow them." It contained a spirited opening 
editorial by Lowell, pleading not for a national 
literature but for a natural literature ; and the 
number as a whole was an excellent one. That 
and the two succeeding issues contained contri- 



58 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

butions by Hawtborne, Dr, T. W. Parsons, Poe, 
Mrs. Browning (tben Miss Barrett), W. W. 
Story, John S. Dwigbt, Jones Very, and John 
Neal, not to mention others of less eminence. It 
was admirably printed, and, barring some mar- 
ginal embellishment in the florid taste of the 
time, it was admirably illustrated, with a few 
excellent engravings in each number. 

The life of "The Pioneer," however, was 
briefer than even a skeptical observer would 
have anticipated. Hardly was the first number 
printed before Lowell became afflicted with a 
serious eye trouble, and on the 10th of January, 
1843, he went to New York for treatment by a 
Dr. Elliott, the foremost oculist of his time. 
Carter seems not to have possessed quite the 
energy and optimism of his young chief, and al- 
though Lowell did what he could from New York 
to get each number of the magazine through the 
press on time, the March number was eight days 
late. The publishers claimed the forfeit of five 
hundred dollars, but finally offered to waive it if 
the contract should be so changed as to require 
them to take only so many copies as they might 
reasonably expect to sell. As a result, the credit of 
the editors was impaired, and they were obliged to 
stop printing. They were left with a considerable 
debt, both to printers and contributors, of which 
Lowell's personal share reached the respectable 



POET AND ABOLITIONIST 69 

sum of $1800. He felt the blow keenly, for apart 
from the burden of debt, the discontinuance of 
a magazine which had started with such high 
aims and had drawn together so notable a body 
of contributors was a bitter disappointment to 
him. 

Lowell's brief editorial experience on " The 
Pioneer," together with his stay in New York, 
did him much service in enlarging his acquaint- 
ance among men of letters and in giving him 
a recognized standing among them. He was 
unable to use his eyes while in New York more 
than a little time each day, and he seems to have 
employed his leisure in making the acquaintance 
of many of the litterateurs of the " metropolitan 
circle." He saw something of N. P. Willis, but 
Charles F. Briggs, better known at that time as 
" Harry Franco," was the chief of these new 
acquaintances. He was to be a lifelong friend 
of Lowell's, and as an editor and critic did much 
to blow abroad the fame of his poet friend. 
Lowell also frequented the studio of William 
Page, the painter, whom he had met some time 
before at Nantasket. Page and Lowell were 
both men of a mystical, enthusiastic imagination, 
and each seems to have brought to the other 
something of the quickening impulse of his own 
art. W. J. Stillman wrote of their friendship, 
at a time a little later than this : — 



60 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

" I used to visit the studio of William Page, 
the poet's intimate friend and ardent admirer, to 
whose almost inspired (oracular certainly) im- 
provisations on art and poetry I used to listen 
till my own blood ran quick and my own enthu- 
siasm made me see what was never to be seen 
again, even in dreams. Page used to repeat 
Lowell's poems with his own commentary, so 
subtly fantastic at times that it made me think 
he had taken part in the composition of the 
poet's text, or thought he had, at least." 

The chief immediate results of this friendship 
were that for a time Page seems to have made 
Lowell's poems more picturesque, while Lowell 
made Page's pictures more poetic ; that the vol- 
ume of poems published at the end of 1843 was 
dedicated to Page ; and that Page painted Low- 
ell's portrait, and exhibited it in New York in 
the spring. 

Page's familiar portrait of Lowell is a sad and 
shadowy likeness, much idealized, in which the 
poet is given a wide Elizabethan collar and hair 
sweeping his shoulders. It hardly seems like the 
same man depicted in the daguerreotypes of the 
time, which show a ruddy, compact, carefully 
clothed young man, not ill-content with himself. 
But no reader of his poetry and letters written 
at this time can doubt that the alchemy of the 
painter threw upon the canvas a better present- 



POET AND ABOLITIONIST 61 

ment of the real Lowell than the chemistry of 
the sun had printed upon the daguerreotypist's 
plate. 

Lowell went back to Cambridge, where he was 
now established again at Elmwood, at the end of 
February, 1843. For the remainder of the year 
he seems to have been chiefly engaged in pre- 
paring for the press a volume of poems which 
was to appear in December, 1843, though dated 
1844. The domestic life in those days at Elm- 
wood was sorrowful. Mrs. Lowell's mind was 
now completely disordered, and Rebecca Lowell, 
our author's oldest sister, had begun to show the 
first signs of mental oddity and disease. During 
the four days of the week which his father spent 
in Boston, it was necessary for Lowell to remain 
uninterruptedly in the house with his sister and 
mother. His chief supports in this year seem to 
have been his poetic expression and the company 
of Maria White, who was living in her father's 
house at Watertown, a half -hour's walk distant. 
Li September of 1843 he made a brief vacation 
trip to Bangor, but with the exception of this 
excursion he seems not to have left Elmwood for 
many months. 

At the end of the year appeared Lowell's 
" Poems," first series, with the imprint of John 
Owen, Cambridge. In this volume, which was 
made up chiefly of his poetic work since the pub- 



62 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

llcation of "A Year's Life," in 1841, we get 
for the first time a clear foreshadowing of the 
range, variety, and tone of his mature poetry. 
Nearly all the poems in the volume are in some 
sense autobiographic. The burden of them, how- 
ever, is perhaps expressed most clearly in the 
sonnet written upon his twenty-fourth birthday, 
which he never reprinted : — 

" Now have I quite passed by that cloudy If 
That darkened the wild hope of my boyish days," 

SO it begins ; and two lines below we find : — 

" Now doth love's sun my soul with splendor fill, 
And hope hath struggled upward into power." 

Apart from the greater precision and resonance 
of tone in this volume, two things are especially 
notable. For the first time since his class poem 
and his old familiar letters in verse, LowelFs 
whimsicality begins to sparkle through the tex- 
ture of his poetry. This seems to show that he 
is beginning to be sufficiently master of the 
form to be able to express his real self in it, 
whereas at the time of the publication of " A 
Year's Life " the act of composition never failed 
to throw him into a mood of artificial sadness, 
as of an old lion or a lover's lute. The second 
notable thing in the volume for our present pur- 
pose is the prevalence in it of poems dealing 
with the moral and political issues of the hour. 



POET AND ABOLITIONIST 63 

It contains a few wholly personal lyrics, a few 
narrative poems upon classical or medifeval sub- 
jects, like *' Khcecus " and '' A Legend of Brit- 
tany," where the inspiration is purely poetic and 
artistic ; but the bulk of the volume is of poems 
like " Prometheus," " A Glance Behind the Cur- 
tain," or " On Reading Wordsworth's Sonnets 
in Defence of Capital Punishment," in which 
Lowell takes no wavering stand as one of the 
*' poets militant below." 

The reception of the " Poems " was gratifying 
to Lowell and Miss White. Margaret Fuller, to 
be sure, found them " absolutely wanting in the 
true spirit and tone of j^oesy ; " and added in her 
decided way, with its curious echo of the accent 
of Macaulay, '' His interest in the moral questions 
of the day has supplied the want of vitality in 
himself ; his great facility of versification has 
enabled him to fill the ear with a copious stream 
of pleasant sound. But his verse is stereotyped : 
his thoughts sound no depth, and posterity will 
not remember him." But the majority of the 
reviewers gave the " Poems " unbridled praise. 
In a little less than three months, eleven hun- 
dred copies of the book were sold, exclusive of 
an edition published in England by Mudie — 
no mean record for a volume of verse. Lowell's 
expenses at this time, living, as he did, at home, 
were slight; and the success of his book did 



64 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

much to help him out of the embarrassment in 
which he had been placed by the failure of " Tlie 
Pioneer," and made marriage at the end of the 
year begin to seem practicable. This was made 
to appear the more feasible by the fact that his 
connection with the anti-slavery movement be- 
gan to yield him some return for his writings in 
verse and prose. Lowell was never in the ex- 
treme wing of the abolitionists. In the New 
England Anti-Slavery Convention held in Boston 
in May, 1844, in which a vote for disunion was 
carried 250 to 24, Lowell and Maria White voted 
" Nay." But his standing as the most effective 
poet, after Whittier, in the abolitionist party 
was constantly solidifying. In August, 1844, 
Whittier himself wrote to Lowell asking for a 
poem for an anti-slavery meeting in Salem, in 
such phrase as this : " Give me one that shall 
be to our cause what the song of Rouget de Lisle 
was to the French Republicans, — such a one as 
the maiden may whisper in the 

* asphodel flower-fleece 
She walks ankle deep in,* 

and the strong man may sing at his forge and 
plow." 

By September of 1844 it had been definitely 
arranged that Lowell and Maria White should 
be married on the day after Christmas, and 



POET AND ABOLITIONIST 65 

should go at once to Philadelphia, where Lowell 
was to take the position of editorial writer on 
the staff of the " Pennsylvania Freeman." 

Lowell spent the autumn of 1844 in preparing 
for the press his " Conversations on Some of the 
Old Poets," which was issued in December, bear- 
ing the date 1845. It was published in London 
by Clarke in the same year. A second Amer- 
ican edition was soon called for, and it was 
reprinted again by Ticknor & Fields in 1862. 
From this time onward all of Lowell's books were 
successfully sold in England and went through 
numerous editions in this country. The "Con- 
versations " is dedicated to his father, though the 
dedication confesses that the volume contains 
" many opinions from which he will wholly, yet 
with the large charity of a Christian heart, dis- 
sent." In the preface " To the Reader," Lowell 
states his view of the purpose of criticism very 
characteristically : " If some of the topics intro- 
duced seem foreign to the subject, I can only say 
that they are not so to my mind, and that an 
author's object in writing criticisms is not only 
to bring to light the beauties of the works he 
is considering, but also to express his own opin- 
ions upon those and other matters." Throughout 
the " Conversations " Lowell gives the " other 
matters " very plentiful attention. Indeed, he 
seems to have chosen the form of conversation 



66 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

largely for the sake of freeing himself from the 
obligation of strict prose structure and to afford 
freer scope for excursus and expatiation ; John 
and Philip, who are the hypothetical personages 
of the conversation, are but slightly differentiated, 
and the talk meanders at the author's will. As a 
matter of fact, Lowell, with a somewhat frugal 
mind, seems to have employed the " Conversa- 
tions " for getting together pretty much every- 
thing that he had written in prose up to that 
time. A good part of the bulk of the volume is 
taken over with but slight revision from the pa- 
pers in the " Miscellany." Many passages even 
are introduced from letters that Lowell had writ- 
ten two or three years before, and his Common- 
place Books were drained of all their best. 

Precisely for this reason, the volume of the 
" Conversations " is of considerable importance 
to the student of Lowell, showing as it does in 
compact compass the furnishing of his mind and 
the direction of his literary views in the years be- 
tween 1840 and 1845. Its temper throughout is 
that of the young humanist. " Nothing," says 
Lowell in one place in it, " which ever had a 
meaning for mankind, loses it by the lapse of 
years," and his affair was to express from his 
favorite authors this old meaning. As a whole, 
the conversations are less of a florilegium than 
the essays in the " Miscellany." He still employs 



POET AND ABOLITIONIST 67 

admiring italics, and frequently goes aside to 
quote a favorite passage, even when it is not very 
germane to the matter in hand. Yet one will find 
many of his characteristic lifelong opinions and 
literary preferences set forth with no uncertaii' 
tone. Chaucer, Spenser, Chapman, Ford, Taylor, 
Donne, Marvel, and Keats are the authors with 
whom he is most concerned ; though he even 
shows an acquaintance, remarkable for a young 
man in those times, with such out-of-the-way and 
shadowy figures as Barnaby Barnes and Blackr 
more. We find here, too, perhaps as a result of 
his stimulating intimacy with Page, a consider- 
able amount of writing about the aesthetics of 
painting, and there are many allusions to the art 
not only of Page, but of Allston, Story, and Cop- 
ley. There is an occasional defect of judgment, 
as where we are told that " Ovid is the truest 
poet among the Latins," but for the most part 
Lowell is here the lover of only the best in liter- 
ature. In mood and style there are still not in- 
frequent traces of mawkishness, but there are 
not wanting passages of sonorous and full- 
freighted prose. 

On the day after Christmas, 1844, Lowell was 
married to Maria White. After a day or two at 
home, the young couple proceeded to Philadel- 
phia, where Lowell at once took up his work as an 



68 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

editorial writer for the "Pennsylvania Freeman.'* 
His stipend from the " Freeman " was incred- 
ibly small — only ten dollars a month. But at 
that time both Lowell and Maria Lowell were 
finding a constant market for verse in the 
" Broadway Journal," then just started and 
edited by their friend Briggs ; and thus they 
were enabled to live. In a letter to Carter writ- 
ten in January, 1845, Lowell gives a charming 
picture of their health and happiness : — 

" We have a little room in the third story 
(back) with white muslin curtains trimmed with 
evergreen, and are as happy as two mortals can 
be. I think Maria is better, I know I am, — in 
health I mean, in spirit we both are. She is 
gaining flesh and so am I, and my cheeks are 
grown so preposterously red that I look as though 
I had rubbed them against all the red brick walls 
in the city." 

The *' Pennsylvania Freeman," which had been 
edited at one time by Whittier, was largely con- 
trolled by the circle of Friends in Philadelphia. 
It was edited during the time of Lowell's con- 
nection with it by C. C. Burleigh and J. Miller 
McKim. To Lowell's ardent and poetic abolition- 
ism the editorial policy of the "Freeman" seemed, 
as he complained, a little timorous and quietistic, 
and his writing in it did not prove so effective 
as his later work in the " National Anti-Slavery 



POET AND ABOLITIONIST 69 

Standard." He contributed only a half-dozen 
editorials to the " Freeman," chiefly dealing with 
the slothf Illness of the Church in its attitude to- 
ward reform. They were very earnest and right- 
hearted pieces of leader-writing, but not always 
editorially adroit, and, moreover, Lowell's mind 
and heart do not seem to have been altogether 
absorbed in his work. As he wrote to Briggs 
on February 15 : " It is hard to write when 
one is first married. The Jews gave a man a 
year's vacation." So, for one reason or another, 
he does not seem altogether to have fulfilled the 
expectations of his editors. 

On the whole, however, the Lowells' months 
in Philadelphia were extremely pleasant and pro- 
fitable. They were thrown with a kindly and 
helpful circle of friends, some of whom, like Mr. 
and Mrs. Edward M. Davis and the McKims, 
seem to have had more than a passing kindness 
for them, though there still lingers in Philadel- 
phia among these families a tradition that young 
Lowell in 1845 talked Yankee, the dialect that 
was to be of Hosea Biglow, with too little in- 
terruption. 

In May, 1845, Lowell's connection with the 
*' Freeman " came to an end, and he journeyed 
leisurely homeward, stopping in New York to 
visit Briggs, and also to call on Poe, with whom 
he had had for some years a fervid but some- 



70 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

wliat spasmodic correspondence. The latter he 
found, as Mrs. Clemm noted with pathetic regret, 
" not quite himself." 

After their return from Philadelphia, Mr. and 
Mrs. Lowell settled in a suite of upper rooms at 
Elm wood, and this was their home during the 
eight years of their married life. On the last 
day of the year their first daughter, Blanche, 
was born there. 

In the following year, 1846, Lowell's pub- 
lished work was for a professional man of letters 
surprisingly slight. Its sum total of printed pro- 
duction for the year was only five poems and 
five newspaper and magazine articles. The reason 
for this is easily to be seen in the variety and 
fullness of his domestic concerns in that year. 
Abijah White, father of Mrs. Lowell, had died 
in the September of 1845, and for a time it was 
thought that Mrs. Lowell's inheritance from the 
estate would be sufficient to give the young 
couple an independence. They even contem- 
plated going at once to spend some time abroad. 
After the settlement, however, the inheritance 
shrank, as is the melancholy way of such things, 
until this was out of the question. It was, however, 
sufficient to give the Lowells a little greater 
sense of security, to enable them to spend the 
summer at Stockbridge, — where Longfellow 



POET AND ABOLITIONIST 71 

found our poet "hale as a young farmer," — 
and to take Lowell's mind for a time from his 
poetry. Furthermore, his life at this time was in 
every way too full and happy to leave hiui that 
craving for poetic expression which is more often 
the result of frustration than of attainment. 

He is still a " man of feeling." So late as 
August, 1845, he wrote to Briggs : — 

" My sorrows are not literary ones, but those 
of daily life. I pass through the world and meet 
with scarcely a response to the affectionateness 
of my nature. I believe Maria only knows how 
loving I am truly. Brought up in a very reserved 
and conventional family, I cannot in society ap- 
pear what I really am. I go out sometimes with 
my heart so full of yearning toward my fellows 
that the indifferent look with which even entire 
strangers pass me brings tears into my eyes. 
And then to be looked upon by those who do 
know me (externally) as ' Lowell the poet ' — 
it makes me sick. Why not Lowell the man, — 
the boy rather, — as Jemmy Lowell, as I was at 
school ? " 1 

In 1846, however, Lowell had a more ample 
outlet for the affection ateness of his nature, and 
we hear little more of this half -morbid longing. 
How deep was his joy in his child can be discov- 
ered from nearly all his letters written at this 

1 Letters, vol. i, p. 144. 



72 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

time. Writing to Mr. Davis when Blanche was 
some four months old, he says : — 

" Miss Blanche Lowell, in the freshness of 
her morning spirits, is, in my opinion, a sight 
well worth a journey from Philadelphia to look 
upon. Why, she laughs all over. You can see 
it through her clothes. The very tips of her toes 
twinkle for joy. And then there is not a chanti- 
cleer in my numerous flock who can compare 
with her for crowing. She has another grace 
which I might in modesty omit, but I love 
truth ! She is exceedingly fond of her father." ^ 

All the numerous accounts which have been 
written of Lowell's domestic establishment at 
this time show it to have been of idyllic, affec- 
tionate frugality. Lowell himself writes of his 
wife that she is always " cruising like Admiral 
Van Trump with a broom at her masthead," 
and Colonel T. W. Higginson has recorded how 
he called on the Lowells and found the baby 
rocked in a cradle made of half a barrel with 
the motto " Puritas^ Potestas " painted upon 
the half of its head. Nor was Lowell the tradi- 
tional inefficient literary person in the home. 
In February, 1846, he wrote to Briggs : — 

" I never see Maria mending my stockings, or 
Ellen bringing the water for my showerbath in 
the morning, without hearing a faint tinkle of 

1 Letters, vol. i, p. 156. 



POET AND ABOLITIONIST 73 

chains. Yet how avoid it? Maria laughs when 
I propose to learn darning, and Ellen flies into 
open rebellion and snatches the pail out of my 
hands when I would fain assume half of the old 
Israelitish drudgery, and become my own bearer 
of water. After prolonged controversy and 
diplomatic negotiation day after day on the cel- 
lar stairs, a treaty was concluded by which I was 
always to bring up my own coal, and yet on this 
very morning I surprised Ellen, in flagrant vio- 
lation of the treaty, halfway upstairs on her way 
to my garret with a hodful." ^ 

Thinking of such a home life as this, one can 
neither wonder at nor regret the paucity of 
Lowell's literary production in this year. He 
was not, however, wholly given up to his quiet 
happiness at home. He was frequently in Boston 
convening with the abolitionist circle there, and in 
February, March, April, and May, he wrote four 
able articles on anti-slavery in the United States 
for the '' London Daily News." In May, 1846, 
Longfellow wrote in his journal : " Called to 
see Lowell this morning, and climbed to his ce- 
lestial study, with its pleasant prospect through 
the small square windows, and its ceiling so low 
you can touch it with your hand. Read Donne's 
poems while he went down to feed his hens and 
chickens. We then discoursed of the abolition- 
^ Letters, vol. i, p. 149. 



74 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

ists for half an hour. He is very ardent on this 
topic." In June of that year he made an 
arrangement to contribute articles in prose and 
verse to the "National Anti-Slavery Standard." 
This was to be his main employment for nearly 
four years, though he did not become its corre- 
sponding editor until 1848. 

Perhaps the most curious manifestation of the 
reform spirit in Lowell during this year was a 
significant correspondence with Oliver Wendell 
Holmes. Lowell's letters have not been pre- 
served, but by the reply of Holmes which is 
printed in Morse's biography of him, the char- 
acter of it may be discovered. Lowell seems to 
have written to Holmes in November, reproach- 
ing him with being a faineant, and an obstruc- 
tionist to all advanced notions of war, slavery, 
the claims of the poor, temperance, and reform 
in general. The future Autocrat replied with 
great propriety and dignity and a certain lurk- 
ing humor. He was prepared to confess his 
negligence concerning some of the matters in 
Lowell's indictment, but went on to say concern- 
ing his writing, which Lowell had accused of 
sof t-handedness : — 

" But I must say, with regard to art and a 
management of my own powers, I think I shall 
in the main follow my own judgment and taste 
rather than mould myself upon those of others. 



POET AND ABOLITIONIST 75 

. . . Let me try to impress and please my fel- 
lowmen after my own fashion at present. When 
I come to your way of thinking (this may hap- 
pen) I hope I shall be found worthy of a less 
qualified approbation than you have felt con- 
strained to give me at this time." 

One feels that Holmes was a little piqued by 
this reproof from a young man ten years his 
junior, at that time a comparative stranger to 
him. But any unpleasantness of feeling that 
there may have been soon wore away, and within 
two years we shall find Lowell and Holmes 
bound together in a lifelong friendship. This, 
it may be remarked here, though a little out of 
strict chronological sequence, was as much ow- 
ing to the mellowing of Lowell as to any convic- 
tion of sin on Holmes's part. Indeed, from 1846 
onward, despite Lowell's brief connection with 
the " Anti-Slavery Standard " and its promoters, 
we can trace in his friendships a significant evo- 
lution. In his letters we find from this time 
fewer and fewer written to his abolitionist and 
Quaker friends in Philadelphia and New York, 
and fewer references to the abolitionists in Bos- 
ton, and it is clear that he was constantly becom- 
ing more intimate with the high Cambridge circle 
of Felton, Longfellow, and the other Olympians 
that then were. This change of circle progressed 
more rapidly after Maria White's death in 1853, 



76 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

but its beginnings may be plainly seen about 
this time. 

In March, 1847, the first sharp grief of Low- 
ell's life came to him in the death of his daugh- 
ter, Blanche. It was this deep sorrow that found 
expression in those utterly sincere and human 
poems, " She came and went," " The Change- 
ling," and " The First Snowfall." F. H. Under- 
wood has recorded that for many years a tiny 
shoe hung over a picture in Lowell's study. In 
September, 1847, was born the Lowells' second 
child, Mabel, and from their joy in her there 
seems to have come a slow healing of their pain. 

Apart from these vital facts, the record of 
Lowell's life in 1847 is not specially significant. 
He contributed a few poems to the " Standard," 
a few reviews in the elaborate style of the time 
to the " North American Review ; " he began the 
composition of the " Fable for Critics ; " and 
toward the end of the year he printed the second, 
third, and fourth of the " Biglow Papers " in the 
" Boston Courier," the first letter " from Mr. 
Ezekiel Biglow, Jaalam, to the Honorable Jo- 
seph T. Buckingham, Editor of the Boston 
Courier, enclosing a poem of his son, Mr. Hosea 
Biglow," having appeared in the " Courier " on 
the 17th of June of the preceding year. But in 
the main the year of 1847, like that of 1846, 
seems to have been one of those eddies in the 



POET AND ABOLITIONIST 77 

stream of a poet's life from which it flows on- 
ward in deeper and swifter volume. 

2. Annus Mirabilis (1848). 

In 1848 Lowell was ten years out of college. 
He had gained in the law some brief experience 
of affairs ; he had enjoyed a more varied experi- 
ence in letters ; he had been recognized as a 
poet ; he had taken a right-hearted stand on the 
moral questions of the day, and fleshed his point 
in the evils ; he had undergone some of the most 
profound emotional experiences that can come 
to a man , yet he had never done anything quite 
to justify the admiration of his friends or his 
own high hopes. But now, overriding " the 
Spence negligence," conquering for once that 
"dose of poppy" in his veins of which he was 
always complaining, and exemplifying the Low- 
ell family motto, " Seize Your Chance," he con- 
trived in a single year to make the whole body 
of his power effective in literature. 

In this year he published son^ twoscore arti- 
cles and poems in magazines and papers, and four 
volumes : his " Poems," second series, which was 
published at the beginning of tjie year, and the 
" Fable for Critics," the '' Biglow Papers," and 
" Sir Launfal," which were published toward its 
end. In these volumes we have expressed nearly 
all sides of the many-faceted Lowell that men 



78 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

remember. He appeared in them as poet, wit, 
critic, scholar, and reformer, and there was 
scarcely a line in any one of the four volumes 
which did not tingle with the true quality of the 
man. 

So busy was Lowell's life in this year that his 
letters written during it deal with practically 
nothing but his writing, and in considering it 
now there is little else to be taken account of. 

The second series of " Poems " which Lowell 
published just at the beginning of 1848 was 
largely made up of those which he had been con- 
tributing to the " Standard " and other radical 
papers. In these poems on the moral and politi- 
cal issues of the time, Lowell showed, along with 
a clear poetic impulse, something of the faculty 
of a skillful leader-writer for turning old mate- 
rial over and over, and thrusting at his foe from 
many sides. For this reason, perhaps, the ma- 
jority of these pieces are not of the first poetic 
vitality ; but in at least one poem in the volume, 
" The Present Crisis," written in December, 
1844, he contrived to fuse those strains of poet 
and preacher which were sometimes at war in 
him into a sonorous and inspiring expression 
of moral passion. There seems to have been in 
his mind while composing it the long reverbera- 
tion of "Locksley Hall," and perhaps of those 
billowy lines of Bernard's : — 



POET AND ABOLITIONIST 79 

" Hora novissima, tempora pessima sunt, vigilemus! 
Ecce, minaciter imminet arbiter, ille supremus." 

But how memorably are the messages of the old 
singer and of the new turned against the very 
present crisis of the Texas controversy in such 
stanzas as this : — 

" Careless seems the great avenger ; history's pages but 

record 
One death grapple in the darkness 'twixt old systems and 

the Word; 
Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the 

throne, — 
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim 

unknown, 
Staudeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above His 

own." 

For twenty years the solemn monitory music 
of this poem never ceased to reecho in public 
halls. In the Lowell Memorial Address which 
George William Curtis delivered before the 
Brooklyn Institute, February 22, 1892, he said 
in his heightened way of some passages of " The 
Present Crisis : " " Wendell Phillips winged 
with their music and tipped with their flame the 
darts of his fervid appeal and manly scorn. As 
he quoted them with suppressed emotion in his 
low, melodious, penetrating voice the white plume 
of the resistless Navarre of eloquence gained a 
loftier grace, that relentless sword of invective 
a more flashing edge." And the stanza of " The 



80 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

Present Crisis," beginning, "For humanity sweeps 
onward," was made by Sumner the text and 
motif of that famous " Crime against Speech " 
oration that provoked the assault of Preston 
Brooks. 

Yet even in this 1848 volume we find a sprin- 
kling of poems which show Lowell as pure poet, 
whom not even the trumpet call of public ser- 
vice can draw away altogether from the quest of 
beauty. The volume concludes with " An In- 
dian Summer Reverie," a long and loving cele- 
bration of the moods of the landscape amid 
which he lived, with its trees and birds and 
thronging memories. 

The " Fable for Critics " had been begun as 
early as November, 1847, and several hundred 
lines of it had been completed almost at a single 
sitting. It was then laid by for a time, and 
taken up at intervals during nearly a year. In 
March, 1848, Lowell, then halfway through it, 
called on Longfellow and told him that he never 
intended to write any more poetry, at least for 
many years, as he found it impossible " to write 
slowly enough." However, he returned to the 
" Fable " from time to time, and it was finally 
published, with its well-known metrical title- 
page, on " October, the thirty first day," 1848. 
With characteristic generosity Lowell had made 
a present of its copyright to Briggs, and the net 



POET AND ABOLITIONIST 81 

gains from it were melted down into a little sil- 
ver plate, wliich Mr. Briggs's daughter still 
cherishes. 

It is needless here to comment on the brilliant 
fluency of the " Fable for Critics," to dwell on 
its judgments, often so shrewd and fine, or to 
point out its gallant service to American litera- 
ture at that time when practically all criticism, 
save Poe's erratic fusillades, was " tuned after 
old dedications and tombstones." Its objective 
effect on Lowell's life, however, must be noted. 
With the first series of " Biglow Papers," soon 
to be issued, it helped to give him a definite 
position as an American humorist, both with the 
general reader and with the elect of letters. In 
Morse's life of Holmes is preserved a letter from 
Holmes to Lowell about the "Fable," which 
must have afforded the recipient of it the keenest 
pleasure. It is particularly interesting coming 
after the edifying correspondence mentioned 
above : — 

" I think it is capital " — writes Holmes, 
" crammed full and rammed down hard — pow- 
der (lots of it) — shot — slugs — very little 
wadding, and that is guncotton — all crowded 
into a rusty-looking sort of a blunderbuss barrel, 
as it were — capped with a percussion preface — • 
and cocked with a title page as apropos as a 
wink to a joke." And a little later Ruskin wrote 



82 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

to Mr. Norton about the "Fable," in a letter 
which was doubtless communicated to Lowell: 
" He does me more good in my dull fits than 
anybody, and makes me hopeful again. What a 
beautiful face he has." 

"The Vision of Sir Launfal," which was pub- 
lished soon after the " Fable," marks again with 
increased definition that queer duality in Lowell, 
— half mystic, half mocker, — which we shall 
have occasion so many times to note. This was 
never better stated than in Lowell's own clear- 
eyed characterization of himself written to Briggs 
the year before : — 

" I find myself very curiously compounded of 
two utterly distinct characters. One half of me 
is clear mystic and enthusiast, and the other hu- 
morist. If I had lived as solitary as a hermit of 
the Thebais, I doubt not that I should have had 
as authentic interviews with the Evil One as 
they, and, without any disrespect to the saint, it 
would have taken very little to have made a 
Saint Francis of me. Indeed, during that part 
of my life which I lived most alone, I was never 
a single night unvisited by visions, and once 1 
thought I had a personal revelation from God 
Himself. I can believe perfectly in the sincerity 
of those who are commonly called religious im- 
postors, for, at one time, a meteor could not fall, 
nor lightning flash, that I did not in some way 



POET AND ABOLITIONIST 83 

connect it with my own interior life and destiny. 
On the other hand, had I mixed more with the 
world than I have, I should probably have be- 
come a Pantagruelist." ^ 

There is probably no poem in American lit- 
erature in which a visionary faculty like that 
suggested above is expressed with such a firm 
command of poetic background and variety of 
music as in " Sir Launfal." Holmes was doubt- 
less correct in writing to Lowell as he did upon 
its publication : " To my ear it wants finish in 
some portions and is marred by certain incongru- 
ities ; " its structure, too, is certainly — as we 
may see later — far from perfect ; yet for all 
that it has stood the searching test of time ; it is 
beloved now by thousands of young American 
readers, for whom it has been a first initiation 
to the beauty of poetic idealism. 

In the " Biglow Papers," Lowell for the first 
time appeared in his full stature as a humorist, 
and for the first time expressed nearly the whole 
of that New England world that had gone to his 
making. Its shrewd common sense, its learning, 
its idealism, its canniness, its poetry, its prosi- 
ness, its queer blend of piety and protest, — all 
are here minted into something that is as unal- 
loyed, rare, and racy of the soil as a pine-tree 
shilling. We have seen how, so early as 1845, 
1 Letters, vol. i, pp. 103, 164. 



84 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

Lowell had begun to qualify for the part of 
Hosea Biglow. We have seen also how since his 
first college days he had been voyaging through 
those strange seas of books which enabled him 
to assume the role of Parson Wilbur so happily. 
For all of Lowell's multifarious journalism in 
those years, it could have been said of him, too, 
" He feels more at home with Fulke Greville, 
Herbert of Cherbury, Quarles, George Her- 
bert, and Browne, than with his modern English 
cousins." But more than that, if we look below 
the delightful Peacockian prose of the old man 
and beneath the Yankee garb of Hosea, we shall 
find that the two characters dramatize the two 
chief sides of Lowell himself even more perfectly 
than they do two major strains of the New Eng- 
land character. Lowell never outgrew the ver- 
nacular wit and wisdom of Hosea, any more than 
he ever ceased to partake of that old-world lore 
of Parson Wilbur, which is bodied forth in such 
full-cadenced prose. As we shall see when we 
come by and by to deal more strictly with the 
qualities of Lowell's poetry and of his prose, he 
never expressed his very self more character- 
istically than in the rhyming of Jaalam's bard, 
and in the concerted paragraphs of her Dominie. 
There has never been a more effective use of the 
weapons of literature in American politics. In- 
deed, Lowell was almost the first to employ the 



POET AND ABOLITIONIST 85 

rapier of poetic satire ; for, compared with his 
writing in the " Biglow Papers," Freneau's 
poetic weapon is but a bludgeon. From the time 
of the appearance of what Lowell modestly 
styled " A sort of squib," in the Boston " Cou- 
rier " for June 17, 1846, the stinging phrases of 
poet and parson were on everybody's lips ; and 
as the series developed in the " Courier " and in 
the "Anti-Slavery Standard," its actual effect 
in politics was not insignificant. It did not, 
of course, prevent the Mexican War, nor did it 
ameliorate any of the abuses which followed in 
the train of that war ; but certainly, as the pro- 
fessional historians agree, it did help notably in 
unifying public opinion at the North, and in 
making things exceedingly uncomfortable for the 
men for whom discomfort was righteous. It is 
said, perhaps mythically, that the Honorable 
John P. Robinson of Lowell, the same who said 
he would n't " vote fer Guvener B.," fled abroad 
to escape from the sound of his own name in the 
street ; only to hear a child in an adjoining room 
at Liverpool chant the obnoxious refrain, and to 
be stung by it again on a street in Malta. How- 
ever that may be, there was scarcely an editorial 
writer on any of the more radical papers at the 
North who could do his column without quoting 
some tag like, — 
"An* you 've gut to git up airly ef you want to take in God." 



86 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

In the fifty years since then, in every great moral 
crisis that this country has confronted, phrases 
and passages from the " Bigiow Papers " have 
been sure to crop up numerously in the daily 
press ; and more phrases from it — phrases like 
" There you have it, plain and flat," or '' They 
did n't know everything down in Judee " — have 
passed into popular speech than perhaps from 
any other poem or group of poems in the his- 
tory of our literature. 

The popularity of the " Bigiow Papers " even 
extended from America to England. An edition 
was pirated there in 1859, and an authorized 
edition was issued soon after by Triibner & Co., 
with an eloquent preface by the author of " Tom 
Brown's School Days." Hughes, who was not at 
that time acquainted with Lowell, wrote of the 
" Bigiow Papers " with a sympathy and admira- 
tion that were perhaps more genial than critical, 
but with a liking which he certainly shared with 
some of the best judges of his time : — 

" Greece had her Aristophanes ; Rome her 
Juvenal ; Spain has had her Cervantes ; France 
her Rabelais, her Moliere, her Voltaire ; Ger- 
many her Jean Paul, her Heine ; England her 
Swift, her Thackeraj^ ; and America has her 
Lowell. By the side of those great masters of 
satire, though kept somewhat in the rear by pro- 
vincialism of style and subject, the author of 



POET AND ABOLITIONIST 87 

the * Biglow Papers ' holds his own place dis- 
tinct from each and all. The man who reads the 
book for the first time, and is capable of under- 
standing it, has received a new sensation. In 
Lowell the American mind has for the first time 
flowered out into thoroughly original genius." 

Whatever we shall come to think of the criti- 
cal comparisons in this passage, there is not 
much room for dissent from its concluding 
period. Lowell certainly had expressed the 
American mind, and performed for American 
literature the incalculable service of decreasing 
its specific gravity. No American reader, at 
least, can fail to concur with what Hughes says 
a little further along in his preface ; — 

" But for real unmistakable genius, — for that 
glorious fulness of power which knocks a man 
down at a blow for sheer admiration, and then 
makes him rush into the arms of the knocker- 
down, and swear eternal friendship with him for 
sheer delight, — the ' Biglow Papers ' stand 
alone." 

3. Change. 

The impulse of Lowell's wonderful year lasted 
over into the following year of 1849. His con- 
tributions in prose and verse to the " Anti-Sla- 
very Standard," of which he was now the corre- 
sponding editor, with a salary of five hundred 



88 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

dollars a year, still continued. But beginning 
with 1849 we must notice a process of signifi- 
cant change in him. It was in these years that 
Lowell the poet and abolitionist became Professor 
Lowell the critic, — at first thought a rather dif- 
ferent person. 

The significant vital facts in Lowell's life 
from 1848 to 1850 are not very numerous. His 
home was visited by both joy and sorrow. A 
third daughter. Rose, was born the 16th of 
July, 1849, and died six months later, in Feb- 
ruary, 1850. His mother, who had been in an 
asylum for some years, died on the 30th of 
March, 1850. In December, 1850, was born 
Lowell's only son, Walter. Despite his financial 
cares in these years, which for all his growing 
reputation ^ were not inconsiderable, and despite 
the deeper shadow of death which was so often 
over the house, his life in those days of full and 
varied expression was a happy one. Money mat- 
ters he always contrived to manage without cor- 
roding worry. As he wrote to Gay, editor of the 
*' Anti-Slavery Standard," in February, 1849 : — 

"Since the day after I received your remit- 

^ A curious evidence of his increasing importance as a poet 
was the invitation that canie to him to write an ode for the 
celebration of the introduction of Cochituate water into the 
city of Boston. On October 25, 1848, it was sung- by "an im- 
mense choir of schoolchildren " ranged on the banks of Boston's 
£af-famed Batrachiau Pool. 



POET AND ABOLITIONIST 89 

tance for December I have literally not had a 
copper, except a small sum which I borrowed. 
It was all spent before I got it. So is all the last 
one, too. As long as I have money I do not think 
anything about it, except to fancy my present 
stock inexhaustible and capable of buying up the 
world ; but when I have it not I entertain law- 
less and uncertain thoughts. I question those 
fallacious distinctions of mieum and tuum which 
lie at the foundation of all right of property in 
the present social state." ^ 

Lowell's inextinguishable good spirits in those 
days must have been largely due to his own 
health, which was, as always, excellent. As he 
writes in 1848, "I strike out three hundred 
strokes with a pair of twenty-four pound dumb- 
bells every morning and evening ; " and a year 
later he humorously complains that he has " a 
whoreson appearance of health and good spirits " 
which infects men with a false opinion of his 
prosperity. 

In her " Homes of the New World," published 
in 1853, Fredrika Bremer portrayed the estab- 
lishment at Elmwood as she found it when she 
visited there in 1849. Her record is not the least 
pleasant and important in that series of frag- 
mentary impressions of the Lowell home from 
which we have been trying to recapture some 
1 Letters, vol. i, p. 203. 



90 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

sense of the full life that was being lived there. 
Miss Bremer wrote of the poet and his wife : — 

" Her mind has more philosophical depth than 
his. SiDgularly enough I did not discern in him 
that deeply earnest spirit which charmed me in 
some of his poems. He seemed to me occasion- 
ally to be brilliant, witty, gay, especially in the 
evening, when he has what he calls his ' evening 
fever,' when his talk is like an incessant play of 
fireworks. I find him very agreeable and ami- 
able. He seems to have many friends, mostly 
young men." 

It is curious to see how this new friendship 
looked from Lowell's point of view. Writing to 
Briggs a few weeks later, he said with charac- 
teristic warmth : " Fredrika Bremer stayed 
three weeks with us, and I do not like her, I 
love her. She is one of the most beautiful per- 
sons I have ever known — so clear, so simple, so 
right-minded and hearted, and so full of judg- 
ment. I believe she liked us too, and had a good 
time." 

But slight as is the record of Lowell's external 
life in these two years from 1848 to 1850, the 
material for the study of his intellectual develop- 
ment is voluminous and complex, and some 
knowledge of this is of the first importance in 
obtaining a sound conception of the unity of the 
inner forces which swayed his life as a whole. 



POET AND ABOLITIONIST 91 

The course of Lowell's connection with the 
" National Anti-Slavery Standard " is the first 
thing to be considered in dealing with these sig- 
nificant years of change. As we have seen, he 
had begun to contribute to the " Standard " so 
early as 1846, and his name had been printed 
on the editorial page as one of the staff of con- 
tributors ; though he did not assume a definite 
editorial connection with it until April, 1848. 
From this time his name appeared in the head- 
line as corresponding editor until May, 1849, 
when it was bracketed with that of Edmund 
Quincy, to whom, at the request of the directo- 
rate of the " Standard," Lowell resigned half of 
his salary of five hundred dollars per annum. 
Writing to Gay at the time of this change, 
Lowell expresses his dissatisfaction with the 
conditions of his work on the " Standard," a dis- 
satisfaction which he knew to be in some sense 
mutual. Though Gay, as editor-in-chief, clearly 
perceived the value of such a brilliant free lance 
as Lowell, some of the more rigid abolitionists 
on the managing board, like Stephen Foster, 
found his writing not quite to their taste. There 
was too much of the poet and humanist in Lowell, 
notwithstanding all the deep passion of his aboli- 
tionism, for him to go all the way with the abuse 
which some of the abolitionists liked to see 
heaped upon the slaveholder. As he wrote to 



92 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

Gay in this letter, which is perhaps the most 
important document in the history of his connec- 
tion with the Anti-Slavery movement : — 

" You know that I never agreed to the Disso- 
lution-of-the-Union movement, and simply be- 
cause I think it a waste of strength. Why do 
we not separate ourselves from the African whom 
we wish to elevate? from the drunkard? from 
the ignorant? At this moment the song of the 
bobolink comes rippling through my open win- 
dow and preaches peace. Two months ago the 
same missionary was in his South Carolina pul- 
pit, and can I think that he chose another text 
or delivered another sermon there ? Hath not a 
slave-holder hands, organs, dimensions, senses, 
affections, passions? fed with the same food, 
hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same 
diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and 
cooled by the same summer and winter as an 
abolitionist is ? If you prick them, do they not 
bleed? if you tickle them do they not laugh ? if 
you poison them do they not die ? if you wrong 
them shall they not avenge? Nay, I will go a 
step farther, and ask if all this do not apply to 
parsons also? Even they are human." ^ 

Elsewhere in the letter Lowell complains that 
the position of the " Standard " was too con- 
tinuously destructive for him, a poet, to be able 
1 Letters, vol. i, pp. 212, 213. 



POET AND ABOLITIONIST 93 

to throw, his whole heart and soul Into its work, 
and he offers to resign his connection with the 
paper altogether. Gay, however, would not hear 
of this, at least for the present, and so Lowell 
continued to contribute, though with constantly 
decreasing frequency, until the spring of 1852, 
when his name was finally dropped. 

There can be no question that Lowell's con- 
nection with the " Anti-Slavery Standard " did 
him excellent service in chastening some of the 
vagaries of prose style, which had been evi- 
dent in the "Conversations," and in teaching 
him to write with greater crispness and point. 
Nor can there be any question, either, that this 
connection was of excellent service to the aboli- 
tion cause. Lowell, as we have seen, lacked 
something of the complete devotion of the true 
Garrisonian, but he brought into the movement 
a historic perspective which queerly combined 
with the half-mystic political mood of Burke 
something of the moral elevation of puritanism, 
and something of the fervor of the French poli- 
tical idealism of 1848. He had not, to be sure, 
the temperament of the born editorial writer, — 
he wrote in 1848, " It fags me to deal with 
particulars," — and he was never quite able to 
subject his opponents to that caustic, unrelent- 
ing attrition which, in the long run, is the best 
campaign of a militant editor. Sometimes his 



94 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

writing was a little too quizzical ; sometimes he 
allowed himself to slip from irony to seriousness 
where the ironic tone if maintained would have 
been more telling. His faculty of allusion, too, 
was often his bane. His articles too often lugged 
in misty old-world personages, old ballads and 
travelers' tales, wherewith the generality of his 
readers must have been shrewdly puzzled. At 
times, indeed, his allusions were extraordinarily 
keen and telling ; but more often, perhaps, they 
were a little in the air. Yet for all their shortcom- 
ings when judged by the traditions of editorial 
writing, Lowell's articles in the " Standard " must 
have been wonderfully stirring to a certain class 
of readers in the North not always reached by 
the less mannerly assaults of other writers. His 
editorials were full of little satirical apologues 
that rarely failed to make the men at whom they 
were aimed appear both ludicrous and evil ; and 
no one could read his articles and poems sympa- 
thetically from week to week without catching 
something of the spirit that informed them, or 
without deriving something of an impulse to- 
wards whatever things in politics are lovely and 
of good report. 

Beginning with 1849, however, the reader of 
Lowell's political writing can see that his whole 
mind is less occupied with it. He is thinking 
more all the time of his poetic plans. He has 



POET AND ABOLITIONIST 95 

begun, indeed, to lose something of that bound- 
less sense of power wherewith his poetic career 
had started ; but he is coming to have in its place 
a sense of the poetic art as a definite faculty. So 
he began in 1849 to consider his poetic achieve- 
ment up to that time and to forecast the direction 
of his endeavor for the future. In that year he 
published a two-volume collected edition of his 
poems, from which he omitted many of the less 
admirable pieces of the earlier editions ; and he 
began to block out a large poetic undertaking, to 
be called "The Nooning," and to comprise a 
group of American narrative poems, bound to- 
gether in a structure somewhat resembling that 
which Longfellow employed some time after in 
his " Tales of a Wayside Inn." With these ven- 
tures in his mind, he found the drudgery of 
his fortnightly contributions to the " Standard " 
wearing upon him more and more. He keeps 
writing to his friends that he is tired and longs 
for a year of rest in which to meditate his muse. 
As he writes in 1849 : — 

" I believe that I have done better than the 
world knows yet, but the past seems so little 
compared with the future." At last he writes 
to Briggs in January, 1850, that he has definitely 
decided to turn for a time at least from politics 
to poetry. 

" My poems," he says, " have thus far had a 



96 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

regular and natural sequence. First, Love and 
the mere happiness of existence beginning to be 
conscious of itself, then Freedom — both being 
the sides which beauty presented to me — and 
now I am going to try more wholly after beauty 
herself. Next, if I live, I shall try to present Life 
as I have seen it. In ' The Nooning ' I shall 
have not even a glance toward reform. . . . Cer- 
tainly I shall not grind for any Philistines, 
whether Reformers or Conservatives. I find that 
reform cannot take up the whole of me, and I am 
quite sure that eyes were given us to look about 
us with sometimes, and not to be always looking 
forward. If some of my red-hot friends were to 
see this they would call me a backslider, but there 
are other directions in which one may get away 
from people beside the rearward one. Thus I 
have taken an observation whereby to indicate to 
you my present mental and moral latitude and 
longitude. As well as I can judge I am farther 
eastward or nearer morning than ever hitherto." ^ 
It is easy to assign a great variety of possible 
contributing causes for this decision. The circle 
of friends in Cambridge with whom Lowell was 
growing daily into a closer intimacy was not, 
perhaps, quite so ardent in the abolition cause 
as the Band had been, or his old friends of the 
Philadelphia, New York, and Boston abolitionist 
1 Letters, vol. i, pp. 252, 253. 



POET AND ABOLITIONIST 97 

circles. Perhaps with the cares and joys of mo- 
therhood, together with a growing delicacy of 
health, Maria Lowell was less able to throw the 
full force of her intense nature into the abolition 
movement, and so spur Lowell to renewed ac- 
tivity in that direction. Then, too, the evils that 
followed in the train of the Mexican War must 
have been a profound discouragement to all but 
the stanchest of the abolition cohorts. But it is 
not necessary to go far afield to look for ex- 
ternal causes of this mutation of Lowell's mood. 
In all his political activity in these years he had 
been the poetical idealist rather than the bud- 
ding statesman and reformer. And now that he 
had played his part so creditably and laboriously, 
and grown a little weary, it was natural for him 
to return to that reading of books and that 
writing of poetry, which had been and were to 
be his best-loved pursuits. 

" The Nooning " was never completed. Some 
episodes for it, " The Voyage of Leif ," the " Pic- 
tures from Appledore," and "Fitz Adam's 
Story," were finished and published in the maga- 
zines ; but with Lowell's increasing freedom from 
routine engagements, he began to give himself 
for a time more constantly to that meditative 
leisure and bookish browsing which he had been 
craving for years. Finally in 1851 the Lowells 



98 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

decided to spend a year or more in Europe. 
This it was thought would be of great benefit to 
Mrs. Lowell's health, and Lowell himself longed 
for the Wander jahr that he had never had. They 
arranged to pay the expenses of travel by selling 
some of their land at the rate of ten acres a year, 
and in July, 1851, with their two children, Mabel 
and Walter, their nurse, and a goat, they sailed 
from Boston for the Mediterranean. 

Most of the first year of their stay abroad 
was spent in Italy, journeying leisurely from 
place to place, and the winter of 1852 was spent 
wholly in Rome. Save for a few letters to his 
father and the brief Italian note-books which 
were afterwards published, Lowell wrote practi- 
cally nothing during this time. It was a year of 
blind growth. Just before the Lowells arrived 
in Rome, word was sent them that the Reverend 
Charles Lowell had had a paralytic shock and 
had been left by it a broken man. For a time 
they thought of returning at once; but they 
finally decided to stay out their year. Again in 
April, 1852, a bitterer sorrow came to them in 
the sudden death of their only son, Walter. 

Despite this heavy grief, however, Lowell's 
life abroad, fed as it was by deep springs, and 
supported by the affection of so rare a woman as 
Mrs. Lowell, was not altogether unhappy. Rome 
wove her ancient spell over his mood. His fine 



POET AND ABOLITIONIST 99 

sensitiveness balked at partaking in those ec- 
clesiastical spectacles that for many are the chief 
charm of Rome, and he wrote : " For myself, 
I do not want to go and look with mere curiosity 
at what is sacred or solemn to others ; " — nor did 
the vestiges of material antiquity strongly inter- 
est him ; but the grandeur of the historic past of 
the old city by the Tiber stirred his imagination 
profoundly. As he wrote to John Holmes to- 
ward the end of his Roman visit, in a passage 
which some may think prophetic : — 

" Surely the American (and I feel myself more 
intensely American every day ) is last of all at 
home among ruins — but he is at home in Rome. 
I cannot help believing that in some respects we 
represent more truly the old Roman power and 
sentiment than any other people. Our art, our 
literature, are, as theirs, in some sort exotics ; 
but our genius for politics, for law, and, above 
all, for colonization, our instinct for aggrandize- 
ment and for trade, are all Roman. I believe we 
are laying the basis of a more enduring power 
and prosperity, and that we shall not pass away 
till we have stamped ourselves upon the whole 
western hemisphere so deeply, so nobly, that if, 
in the far away future, some Gibbon shall muse 
among our ruins, the history of our Decline and 
Fall shall be more mournful and more epic than 
that of the huge empire amid the dust of whose 



100 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

once world-shaking heart these feelings so often 
come upon me. " ^ 

In the spring of 1852, the Lowells departed 
sadly from Rome, and after a brief excursion 
through the Italian lakes, Switzerland, Germany, 
Provence, and France, they arrived in England 
in the late summer. There they spent some time 
in London, Oxford, and Cambridge, and saw a 
few of the cathedral towns, where in the English 
cathedrals Lowell found, as he wrote to his father, 
something that gave him " more absolute pleasure 
than anything except fine natural scenery." In 
England they made friends with Kenyon, and 
were introduced by him to Landor and other 
literary potentates, and were received with hearty 
welcome by many of the first literary men of the 
time. In October, 1852, they sailed for Boston, 
with two such congenial shipmates as Thackeray, 
who was going over to lecture, and Arthur Hugh 
Clough, who was about to seek his fortune in the 
new world. Despite this exceptional company, the 
monotony of sea-travel coming after his brisk 
visit in England made him dull and disinclined 
to converse ; he notes that he was " driven to five 
meals a day for mental occupation." 

From this time onward for a year, the shadows 
of a deeper sorrow than any that Lowell had yet 
1 Scudder, vol. i, pp. 342, 343. 



POET AND ABOLITIONIST 101 

known were darkening over Elmwood. Long- 
fellow, calling on him soon after his return, 
found him sad and dispirited, and noting this in 
his journal, laid it to the reaction from the ex- 
citement of foreign travel. But it was only partly 
this. He had begun to realize that the sense of 
mortal insecurity which had always troubled and 
deepened his love for Maria White, and had been 
rendered more poignant by the loss of three chil- 
dren, was tragically well founded. Her health 
was growing more and more precarious daily. 

Lowell made earnest efforts throughout these 
months to keep up his cheer in comradeship and 
poetic expression. R. H. Dana noted in his 
journal for January 5, 1853 : " Supped at Low- 
ell's with Thackeray. Present Longfellow, lel- 
ton, Clough (an Englishman), James T. Fields, 
Edmund Quincy. . . . Felton, Lowell, and I did 
nearly all the talking." And it is interesting to 
note that it is just at this time, when he knows 
he is going down into the valley of the shadow, 
that Lowell's characteristic humorous letter, as 
opposed to the witty or jocose epistles of his boy- 
ish days, first emerges in his correspondence. It 
was in January, 1853, that he wrote to Mrs. 
Francis G. Shaw of the pranks which domestic 
furniture was then cutting up under the manip- 
ulations of the new spirit rappers and table 
tippers : — 



102 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

" A neighbor of ours has an exhorting boot- 
jack, and I expect every day to hear of the spirit 
of Diogenes in a washtub. Judge Wells (^Aunt 
Wells, as he is affectionately called by the bar) 
is such a powerful medium that he has to drive 
back the furniture from following him when he 
goes out, as one might a pack of too affectionate 
dogs. I have no doubt I shall meet him some 
day with a footstool gambolling at his side or 
leaping up on his reluctant legs." 

In April, May, and June of 1853, Lowell pub- 
lished in " Putnam's Magazine," then edited 
jointly by his friend Briggs and George William 
Curtis, the first installments of " Our Own," a 
poem which was never completed, and never re- 
printed save in fragments. It runs to several 
hundred lines of very spirited facetiousness and 
miscellaneous social and literary criticism in a 
series of rather Shandean digressions. In the 
autumn he published in the same magazine 
the " Moosehead Journal," which he had writ- 
ten home in installments to Mrs. Lowell during 
a brief summer outing in Maine. In December 
of the preceding year he had written out the 
first chapter of a novel, — a tale, as he after- 
wards described it, of the " moral life in New 
England." The manuscript ends with the words 
" Chapter Second." It is quite as well that it 
was never completed. Chapter first, '' The Place 



POET AND ABOLITIONIST 103 

in Which," with its full description of the towns 
of Squontigook and Skunkville is too quizzical 
in its temper to produce any narrative illusion. 

But these literary ventures, high-spirited as 
they seem on the surface, are to one who reads 
them more understandingly of a pathetic forced 
cheer. Lowell knew throughout the year that 
the happiness of his home must be shattered. In 
September Maria Lowell grew suddenly worse, 
and she died on the 27th of October, 1853. 

How staggering this blow was to Lowell we 
can only guess. His was a nature, for all its 
** sloping to the southern side," peculiarly prone 
to seasons of black melancholy. He was too true 
a man to find in the easy assumptions of tran- 
scendental faith much mitigation for the first 
blankness and despair of human loss. Gradu- 
ally, however, he recovered his hold on life. 
Maria had promised to be with him " if that 
were possible." For months after her death his 
old visionary faculty was constantly active. Al- 
most nightly she revisited his dreams. In course 
of time this came to be to him, as it has to so 
many men bitterly mourning the loss of a loved 
woman, a sweet solace, a wonder, and a wild 
desire. His daughter Mabel was a singularly 
thoughtful and affectionate child, and his care 
for her helped to soften his sorrow. So, as the 
months went by, natura medicatrix performed 



104; JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

her healing ministrations. But Lowell never 
forgot or ceased to mourn. For years the very 
house that he had so deeply loved was dead to 
him : — 

" For it died that autumn morning 
When she, its soul, was borne 
To lie all dark on the hillside 

That looks over woodland and corn." 

And throughout his life, as it grew in fullness and 
fame and came to new happinesses of home, he 
never ceased to keep inviolate the old memory. 
Earely, it is said, did he speak of the " wife of 
his youth." 



CHAPTER III 

PROFESSOR AND EDITOR 

1854-1860 

1. Dresden and Harvard. 

The last months of 1853 and the first of 1854 
were passed by Lowell in sad retirement. His 
father and his sister were with him, but since 
the paralytic stroke which Dr. Lowell had suf- 
fered in 1852, his mind had been partially 
broken and his mood morbidly excitable. Re- 
becca Lowell, too, was " queer," as the phrase 
is, and save for his sunny-hearted daughter 
there was little in the air of home to aid Lowell 
in his struggle back to the broad way of life. 
For a time his own consciousness was unwhole- 
somely complex, and he writes in his letters of 
the "ugly fancy" which he used to have in 
those days, that on coming back from his walks 
he should find some other James Russell Lowell 
sitting in his chair, surrounded by the familiar 
books and belongings which he had mistakenly 
believed to be his own. There were, however, 
many influences at work to draw Lowell back to 



106 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

his old hopes and occupations. His repute as a 
poet was constantly spreading. Briggs had just 
written of him that he was " a greater poet than 
Tennyson," and there were not wanting many 
to agree with this view. But more potent than 
this was the favor which certain prose articles 
in a new vein found with a large circle of readers. 
These were " A Moosehead Journal," published 
in " Putnam's Magazine " for November, 1853 ; 
"Fireside Travels," in " Putnam's Magazine " 
for April and May, 1854 ; and ^' Leaves from 
my Italian Journal," in " Graham's Magazine " 
for April, May, and July, 1854. The variety of 
these prose sketches, their abounding life and 
felicity of phrase, marked Lowell's second con- 
spicuous achievement in prose ; in the opinion 
of the present writer the letters of Parson 
Wilbur had been first. 

It was fortunate for Lowell that he should 
succeed in achieving a popular success in prose 
just at this time when, as he wrote a little later, 
his Muse began to look at him "with eyes of 
paler flame and beckon across a gulf," when he 
began to experience the bitter truth that — 

" 'Tis not the singer's wish that makes the song." 

Henceforth prose was to be his most frequent 
and most effective medium of expression. He 
continued, of course, to write numerous verse. 



PROFESSOR AND EDITOR 107 

and there were to be times when the import 
of some great external occasion was to stir 
Lowell's poetic nature to the depths and spur 
him to detached poetic achievements greater and 
more enduring than anything he had written in 
his poetic period proper ; but for all that, with 
1854 Lowell entered upon his age of reason, — 
and of prose. 

As the winter of 1853-54 wore on, Lowell 
found increasing comfort in his books ; and in 
the records of that winter we begin to see a 
return of unfeigned good spirits. Mr. Moncure 
Conway, calling on him about this time, had 
an experience of his characteristic whimsicality. 
"I had an enthusiasm for Robert Browning," 
writes Mr. Conway, *' but Lowell showed no 
interest in Browning, and shocked me by quot- 
ing the commonplaces about his obscurity. ' I 
own,' he said, * a copy of " Sordello," and any- 
body may have it who will put his hand on his 
heart and say he understands it.' * I have not 
read it,' I replied; 'but what is it about?' 
Placing his hand over his heart, he replied, 
' I don't know.' " 

Lowell spent the summer of 1854 with his 
sister-in-law, Mrs. Charles Lowell, on the Beverly 
shore, then a more primitive region than it is to- 
day. The keen air of that salty, pine-hung shore, 
and the ever-changing spectacle of the unre- 



108 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

gardful sea, did much to restore Lowell's health 
and spirits. He did some cruising along the 
coast, and resumed work upon his " Pictures 
from Appledore," which he had begun some 
years previously. Bryant thought the " Pictures 
from Appledore " to be specimens of mere Flem- 
ish painting. But Lowell was certainly correct 
in maintaining that they were more than that. 
For despite occasional longueurs, no poems in 
the language, not excepting Mr. Swinburne's, 
are more impregnate with the sound and senti- 
ment of the sea. They show how deeply Lowell, 
so generally reckoned a poet of the country-side 
rather than of the shore, had felt the glamour 
of the old Anglo-Saxon sea-spell. 

Returning to Elmwood in the fall, much re- 
freshed and enheartened, Lowell occupied him- 
self in preparing for the press a selection from 
the poems of Maria Lowell ; ^ in revising the 
" Pictures from Appledore," which he sent to 
the " Crayon," with whose young editor, W. J. 
Stillman, he had formed an ardent friendship ; 
and in preparing a course of lectures upon the 
English poets, which he had been invited to de- 
liver in the winter of 1854-55 before the Lowell 
Institute in Boston. 

These lectures proved to be, even in those 
days when the lecture system was in its prime, a 
^ Privately printed at the Riveraide Press in January, 1855. 



PROFESSOR AND EDITOR 109 

signal triumph. The first lecture, an abstract 
discussion of the principles and differentiae of 
prose and poetry, held the audience for fifteen 
minutes beyond the traditional hour, — a thing 
hitherto unheard of in the Institute, where one 
may still see the earnest audience lealdng out as 
soon as the minute hand on the clock behind the 
lecturer's desk has circled the dial. Longfellow 
wrote in his journal after this lecture, " An 
admirable performance;" and Sumner wrote of 
another lecture in the course, " Lowell's lecture 
on Milton lifted me for a whole day. It was the 
utterance of genius in honor of genius," F. H. 
Underwood, afterwards Lowell's associate on the 
*' Atlantic Monthly," gives an animated account 
of Lowell's delivery and its success with the 
audience : — 

" The lectures made a deep impression upon 
the cultivated auditors. . . . Their success was 
due to their intrinsic merits. The popular lec- 
turer is often led to imitate the vehement ac- 
tion of a stump orator and the drollery of a 
comedian by turns. Mr. Lowell's pronunciation 
is clear and precise and the modulations of his 
voice unstudied and agreeable ; but he seldom, 
if ever, raised a hand for gesticulation, and liis 
voice was kept in its natural compass. He read 
like one who had something of importance to 
utter, and the just emphasis was felt in the pene- 



110 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

trating tone. There were no oratorical climaxes 
and no pitfalls set for applause. But the weighty- 
thoughts, the earnest feeling, and the brilliant 
poetical images gave to every discourse an inde- 
scribable charm. The younger portion of the 
audience, especially, enjoyed a feast for which 
all the study of their lives had been a prepara- 
tion." 

The lectures were reported, in an abridgment 
from the manuscript, in the Boston " Advertiser," 
by Lowell's friend Carter. They lack the ripe 
fullness of Lowell's later writing upon Chaucer, 
Spenser, Milton, Pope, and the rest ; but they 
show his familiar keenness of appreciation, and 
they have much of the vitalizing effect upon the 
reader which was always the peculiar merit of 
his critical writing.^ 

Three weeks after the beginning of the lecture 
course Lowell received official notice of an event 
momentous in his life, — his appointment to suc- 
ceed Longfellow in the Smith professorship of 
the French and Spanish Languages and Litera- 
tures and Belles Lettres at Harvard College, 

1 Lowell always refused to publish this series of lectures, 
partly because they failed wholly to satisfy him, partly be- 
cause much of the material in them in a revised form was used 
elsewhere in his writings. Despite his wishes, however, and 
despite the protest of his representatives, the reports in the 
" Advertiser " were reprinted by a club of bibliophiles in 
1897 as "Lectures on the English Poets." 



PROFESSOR AND EDITOR 111 

with permission to spend a year in Europe for 
study to qualify him still further for the post. 
The salary attached to the chair was at that 
time only twelve hundred dollars ; but as Low- 
ell's private income was but six hundred, and his 
miscellaneous income from writing not consider- 
able, this was a timely help. Despite some mis- 
givings as to the effect of professional routine 
upon his poetical impulse, he solaced himself 
with the example of Gray and other poets who 
had held academic positions. He did not fail to 
be both pleased and stimulated by the honor of 
filling the most distinguished belletristic chair 
in America, which had been dignified by such 
occupants as Ticknor and Longfellow. 

He arranged to sail for Europe in the summer 
of 1855. Meanwhile he spent a portion of the 
spring in a lecturing tour through the West, to 
which he had been invited after the conclusion 
of his lectures in Boston. This experience seems 
to have been not altogether inspiriting to him ; 
though, writing to Miss Norton from Madison, 
Wisconsin, on April 9, 1855, he contrives to tell 
of it with his wonted humor : — 

" Though I have been in such dreadfully low 
spirits since I left home that I have not seen 
much to write about, yet I like to keep my pro- 
mises. ... I will premise generally that I hate 
this business of lecturing. To be received at a 



112 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

bad inn by a solemn committee, in a room with 
a stove that smokes, but not exhilarates, to have 
three cold fish-tails laid in your hand to shake, 
to be carried to a cold lecture-room, to read a 
cold lecture to a cold audience, to be carried 
back to your smoke-side, paid, and the three 
fish-tails again — well, it is not delightful ex- 
actly. On the whole, I was so desperate that 
after a week of it I wrote hither to be let off — 
but they would not, and so here I am. I shall 
go home with six hundred dollars in my pocket, 
and one of those insects so common in Italy and 
Egypt in my ear. Sometimes, though, one has 
very pleasant times, and one gets tremendous 
puffs in the local papers." 

On the 29th of May, 1855, Lowell was given 
a rousing farewell dinner at the Kevere House 
in Boston, at which Longfellow, Holmes, and 
others of that circle assisted ; and the following 
morning, after four hours' sleep, and with keen 
recollections, as he noted, of "1790," he took 
the train for New York, and sailed on the 4th 
of June for Havre. After spending a few weeks 
in Paris and making that excursion to Chartres 
which he turned to poetic account fourteen years 
later in " The Cathedral," he crossed to London, 
where he spent some weeks with the Storys, and 
saw much of Thackeray. Here Leigh Hunt told 
him pleasantly that he had been unable to get 



PROFESSOR AND EDITOR 113 

any volumes of his poems in the London Li- 
brary, because they were always out. In the late 
summer he went to Dresden, where for a time 
he had the company of his sister, Mrs. Putnam, 
and established himself for a winter of hard 
study. Here he worked diligently at his Ger- 
man, and attended lectures in German litera- 
ture and aesthetics. He even attended anatom- 
ical lectures. This afforded him a new field of 
simile and metaphor, which he afterward worked 
sometimes a little to excess. He seems to have 
enjoyed the various intellectual life of the Ger- 
man University, yet the winter in Dresden was 
not altogether a happy one, although, as usual, 
he contrives to write of it with inextinguishable 
gayety : — 

..." I am beim Herrn Hofrath Dr. Reichen- 
bach, who is one of the kindest of men, and 
Madame is a 'first-rate fullah' too, as my 
nephew Willie would say. I have a large room 
am Parterre^ with a glass door opening upon a 
pretty garden. My walls are hung with very nice 
pictures painted by the gnadige Frau herself ; 
and they were so thoughtful as to send down be- 
fore I came a large case with American birds very 
well stuffed and mounted, so that I might have 
some friends. Some of them are very familiar, 
and I look at the oriole sometimes till I hear 
him whistling over the buttercups in the dear 



114 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

old times at Elmwood. Ah, how deep out of the 
past his song comes ! But hin ist hin, verloren 
ist verlo7'en ! Then I have one of those solemn 
ceremonials, a German bed — with a feather- 
bed under which I engrave myself at night and 
dream that I am awaiting the last trump. Then 
I have the prettiest writing-table, bought expres 
pour moi by Madame, weil ich ein Dlchter 
biuy — and at which I am now sitting, — with 
drawers for everything and nothing. I rack my 
brains for what to put in 'em. I am fast turn- 
ing into a ' regular ' German, according to the 
definition of that Italian innkeeper at Amalfi, 
who told me, speaking of a man that was 
drowned, ' bisognerebbe che fosse un Tedesco 
percKe sempre stava a casa, e nonfaceva iiiente 
che fumare e studiareJ I get up um sieben Uhr 
and das Mddchen brings me my coffee and 
Butterbrod at 8. Then I begin to study. I 
am reading for my own amusement {du lieber 
Gott!) the aesthetische Forschungen von Adolph 
Zeising, pp. 568, large octavo ! Then I overset 
something aus German into English. Then 
comes dinner at 1 o'clock with ungeheuer Ger- 
man dishes. Nachmittag I study Spanish with a 
nice young Spaniard who is in the house, to 
whom I teach English in return. Uin seeks 
Uhr geJie ich spazieren^ and at 7 come home and 
Dr. R. dictates and I write. Aber poCztausend 



PROFESSOK AND EDITOR 115 

Donnerwetter I what a language it is to be sure ! 
with nomiuatives sending out as many roots as 
that witch-grass which is the pest of all child- 
gardens, and sentences in which one sets sail 
like an admiral with sealed orders, not knowing 
where the devil he is going to till he is in mid- 
ocean ! Then, after tea, we sit and talk German 
— or what some of us take to be such — and 
which I speak already like a native — of some 
other country. But Madame R. is very kind, 
and takes great pains to set me right. The con- 
founded genders ! If I die I will have engraved 
on my tombstone that I died of der^ die, das^ 
not because I caught 'em, but becavise I could n't. 
Dr. E. is one of the most distinguished JVa- 
tzcrwissenschqftsgelehrten (! !) in Europe — a 
charming, friendly, simple-hearted man. I at- 
tend his Vorlesungen, und etwas verstehe." . . .^ 
In the spring of 1856 Lowell went to Italy 
for a brief rest from his hard study. There he 
was met by the Nortons, the Storys, John Field, 
Page, and others, and was lured into extending 
his visit into a stay of several months. He made 
the circuit of Sicily in company with Mr. Norton, 
John Field, and C. C. Black, chiefly on mule- 
back. From the manuscript journal of the tour, 
written jointly by the members of the party, it 
would appear that Lowell was more impressed 
1 Letters, vol. i, pp. 317-319. 



116 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

by the humors of travel, by the Sicilian temper- 
ament as he found it, than by the historic and 
literary sentiment of the places he visited. Even 
on the curved Trinacrian shore, where the bowery 
hollows sloping to the Sicilian sea, the white sky- 
filling mass of Etna, and the flocks still shep- 
herded to the bubbling music of the pipe, revive 
so vividly the old Arcadian world of Theocritus, 
he seems not to have fallen very deeply under the 
spell. Yet how vivacious is this account of his 
adventures in Catania, taken from the unpub- 
lished Journal, from a passage in Lowell's hand. 

CATANIA 

" It may safely be presumed that one need not 
wait longer for the charm of a city than for vac- 
cination to take, — ' he never loved that loved 
not at first sight,' — and as I am writing this 
journal at a week's distance from Catania, I am 
tolerably safe in saying that it is an uninteresting 
town. I examine my mind as a child does his 
vaccinated arm, but no trace of Catania do I 
find there. All that I can remember is the hotel, 
the hotel-book in which some Englishman had 
written — * Mr. & the Misses Brown clean and 
comfortable ' — and the waiter Don Placido, who 
smiled so eternally that you wished he would 
just once kick you — who indeed seemed to smile 



PROFESSOR AND EDITOR 117 

all over, and whose very boots creaked Com- 
mandi SignoHa. Indeed what special interest 
could a city be supposed to have, which owes its 
fame to its having been destroyed by an earth- 
quake? The destroyed city, of course, we did 
not see, and the present one was to supply us 
with money and a carriage to Nicolosi merely. 
A discussion on the budget was first had, and it 
was resolved that the Hospodar ^ (as most likely 
to make a favorable impression on the commer- 
cial world of Catania) should go out and get 
some on his letter of credit. Campo ^ went with 
him to prevent his making any financial blun- 
ders, and he went with Campo to see that no 
money was squandered on lava puddingstones or 
amber bottles small enough for the lachrymatory 
of a miser's heir, utterly useless for that or 
any other purpose. (Statistical memorandum — 
These and silks and fleas are the chief industry 
of Catania.) We went first to the British Con- 
sul (the bird of our country being out of town — 
or said to be) to ask about a banker. He was 
very civil, and directed us to a Signor Stucco — 
or some such name — the Austrian vice-consul 
and the principal banker of Catania. We found 
our way thither and were received with a polite- 
ness which made us both feel quite easy, and 
Campo was in fancy buying half the lava of 
1 LowelL 2 Field. 



118 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

Etna, while the Hospodar in fluent Italian skir- 
mished gracefully over the confines which divide 
conversation from business, and at last drawing 
out his letter, made known the object of his em- 
bassy. The Sicilian started as if he did not know 
the difference between the epistle and a pistol, 
but at last took the proffered document and re- 
tired with it into the dimmer recesses of his web 
like a spider who, feeling his trap sprung, flashes 
out, and then, finding that he has caught not a 
fly but a bumble-bee, flashes as suddenly back 
again. Meanwhile the unsuspicious Hospodar 
and Campo took counsel together how much they 
should draw for. Hopes as transient as the rain- 
drops which the bird shakes from a twig in 
lighting ! The Sicilian was wise in his genera- 
tion and had heard of repudiation. He came 
out with a less beaming countenance, and said 
that it rincresced him and all that, but that he did 
not know who ' Beareeng Freres ' were. In vain 
we expostulated and stated as gently as possible 
the corollary that not to know them argued him- 
self unknown. He combined the corporeal cour- 
tesy of a Chinese Mandarin with the mental 
rigidity of an English poker. He seemed to fear 
his name would take cold by standing in any of 
our drafts. If the British Consul would guar- 
antee our draft he would be enchanted to cash 
it. ' Hang him for a stupid Sicilian ! ' growled 



PROFESSOR AND EDITOR 119 

Campo, but unfortunately this operation, however 
grateful to our feelings, would have been pecuni- 
arily profitable only to the hemp-growers of Sicily. 
Quite dejected, and feeling a very decided tail- 
between-the-legsiness as if we had been detected 
in an unsuccessful attempt at swindling, we came 
back to the Hotel. How little did Don Placido 
think as he went off into smiles as mechanically 
as a musical box into the last waltz, that he was 
doing it all for a party of beggars who, so far 
from getting up Mt. Etna, could not have got up 
eight carlini among them ! We held a treasury- 
meeting— we laughed — we fancied ourselves 
having an experience of Don Rafael or Lazarillo 
di Tormes — we looked at our watches for the 
first time not to see what o'clock it was, but how 
much we could pledge them for. Then it was 
decided that leaving Campo in pawn at the Co- 
rona, and taking the letter of Don Carlos^ as 
being for a larger sum and more impressive, the 
other three should make another effort. We re- 
solved to try the effect of Nero^ as a British 
subject upon the Consul, and he accordingly 
coldcreamed his nose and put on his black hat 
to be as imposing as possible. On the way, we 
thought we would try the American Consulate. 
We found an enormous eagle over the door and 
a dirty Sicilian inside it — short, thick and brown 
1 Mr. Norton. 2 Mr. Black. 



120 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

like a trabuco cigar — greasy like a sausage — 
a seedy half-battered dignitary who evidently 
thought Sicilian water not good enough to wash 
an American functionary in. All that he could 
do for us was to tell us that we had better go to 
a banker named Jacobi, who was a foreigner and 
would know something — the other, he said, with 
an ineffable shrug, was a Sicilian. Here was a 
patriot indeed ! He showed us in going out some 
photographs given him by Mr. G. P. Marsh our 
late Minister at Constantinople, and then showed 
us the door — an interesting object at all times. 
We went back to the British Consul who, if our 
hereditary foe, was still clean, and he gave us a 
note to Signor Stucco, and lent us a boy for 
guide. Mr. Plaster was as civil as ever — gave 
us the last journal, which was only three weeks 
old, retired again with the letter, and reappeared 
to say that if the Consul would guarantee us he 
would let us have money. The youth who had 
guided us was dispatched, and came back in 
about half an hour with another note in which 
the Consul had declared himself willing to 
become security to the amount of ten or fifteen 
pounds. By this delicate scale the Hospodar, 
Don Carlos and Nero were able to weigh the 
united amount of respectability in their faces. 
In the opinion of some thoughtful persons the 
Consul wrote at first ten — and then, thinking 



PROFESSOR AND EDITOR 121 

of the Hospodar added ' or fifteen.' We took 
ten, and returned to raise the spirits of Campo, 
who had begun to fancy that we had decamped 
and was wondering if the sheets would reach 
from the balcony to the ground." 

In the early summer Lowell returned to Dres- 
den, and a few weeks later he sailed westward. 
In August, 1856, he was home again in Cam- 
bridge, established with his daughter, Mabel, and 
her governess. Miss Frances Dunlap, in the house 
of his brother-in-law. Dr. Estes Howe, on Kirk- 
land Street, then known as Professors' Row. 
This was to be his home until January, 1861, for 
during those four years the health of Dr. Lowell 
and of Miss Rebecca Lowell was such that Elm- 
wood could scarcely have been a suitable and 
happy abode for a little girl. 

Miss Frances Dunlap was a sister of Miss 
Elizabeth Dunlap, an intimate friend of Maria 
Lowell. The Dunlaps were a fine old family of 
Portland, Maine, which had experienced a mis- 
fortune by which the daughters had been thrown 
on their own resources for their support. Be- 
fore Mrs. Lowell's death she had wished that 
Mabel might be placed in the care of her friend 
Elizabeth Dunlap ; but Miss Dunlap died soon 
after Mrs. Lowell, and her sister succeeded to 
the charge. Miss Frances Dunlap was a young 



122 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

woman of able and alert intelligence and a sym- 
pathetic, womanly nature — one of those persons, 
it is said, who spread about them a feeling of 
warm comfort and happy quietude, and blessed 
with much of that sweet serenity that seems to 
be the heritage of those who embrace the Swe- 
denborgian faith. She was, too, a beautiful wo- 
man, thought by her friends to be the living 
presentment of the familiar bust of Clytie. 
Lowell's friendship for her had ripened fast, and 
before he went to Europe in 1855 he recognized 
in himself a definite inclination toward her ; but 
wishing to test himself by a year of absence, they 
had parted simply as friends. Upon his return 
from Europe, however, he found this inclination 
but the stronger, and he came more and more to 
depend upon her for comfort and cheer. When 
he had been home a few months, an engagement 
was contracted, and they were married in Sep- 
tember, 1857. Through this union the happiness 
of Lowell's life was reintegrated. Though he did 
not find in his second marriage quite the exalta- 
tion of poetic impulse that he had known with 
Maria White, the influence of the second Mrs. 
Lowell in his life was mellowing and sustaining. 
She had, it is said, both domestic efficiency and 
a native critical talent of a high order. As time 
went on, Lowell came to trust more and more 
to her judgment of his work, and to find in the 



PROFESSOR AND EDITOR 123 

soothing of her presence an effective safeguard 
against the overwrought moods to which he had 
formerly been subject. For the quarter of a 
century that Mrs. Lowell lived after the mar- 
riage, their life together was one of entire hap- 
piness, although they had no children. 

Lowell began his ministrations to the Harvard 
youth in September, 1856, and continued to de- 
liver his lectures and meet his classes without 
interruption for sixteen years. Of his work as 
professor, many accounts, not altogether con- 
sistent, have been handed down ; but by collating 
them we may gain a pretty just impression of 
the manner of it. Coming as he did to the chair 
at the age of thirty-seven, after fifteen years of 
a free literary life, he was wholly devoid of aca- 
demic mannerisms and conventions ; and all the 
witnesses agree as to the freshness, the individu- 
ality and charm of his teaching, — at least in 
the earlier years of it. As time went on, and the 
ageless stream of boys flowed through his class- 
room, he grew a little weary and a little de- 
tached, so that when Mr. Barrett Wendell joined 
his class in Dante in 1876 his first impression 
of Lowell was that he had never met any one 
else so quizzical. Another who about the same 
time attended Lowell's viva voce translation of 
** Don Quixote " was chiefly and particularly im- 
pressed by the way he " got after the commen* 



124 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

tators." But from the first Lowell was a more 
serious teacher than would appear from these 
records ; the more studious sort of boy, provided 
he were willing to surrender himself to Lowell's 
influence, never failed to get from him an ad- 
mirable love of great literature, and an equally 
admirable hatred of cant and buncombe in lit- 
erary matters. 

At first Lowell's work consisted in giving a 
course in Dante, a course in German literature, 
and in delivering at stated intervals public lec- 
tures before the college upon English poetry and 
general letters. As time went on, he dropped 
the course in German, and substituted for it 
another in Spanish literature, which was chiefly 
given up to the translation and exposition of 
" Don Quixote ; " some years later he had a 
course in old French literature, which was to be 
for the last twenty years of his life the field of 
his most exact scholarship. 

Of these courses, that in Dante was his own 
favorite, and the one which proved most stimu- 
lating to his students. His classes were never 
very large, and this made it easy for him to come 
into more intimate relations with his boys than 
would otherwise have been possible. Perhaps 
the most minute and vivid record we have of 
Lowell's Dante class is that by George E. Pond 
in the "Liber Scriptorum," published by the 



PROFESSOR AND EDITOR 125 

Authors' Club of New York, in 1893. This 
shows Lowell in 1859 and 1860, when his teach- 
ing was at its freshest and best, habitually meet- 
ing his class in his study on Kirkland Street. 
It shows his teaching in those days to have been 
remarkable for its readiness, variety, and vivid- 
ness of illustration, for the unfailing politeness 
and geniality of his relations with his class, and 
for a deep concern about the spiritual import of 
the " Divine Comedy." In later years he some- 
times failed to apply himself very directly to the 
individuality of his students ; but in the early 
days every man in his class seems to have felt 
that Lowell was a personal friend. Sometimes 
he even read new-born poems to his boys. But 
while Lowell's teaching, like that of all great 
teaching humanists from Socrates and Erasmus 
down, had a discursiveness, a whimsicality, and 
a personality that is not common in the typical 
pedagogue, he never lost sight of the end of his 
teaching. As he said in a fragmentary lecture on 
the study of literature, published in the " Har- 
vard Crimson " three years after his death : — 

" I believe that the study of imaginative lit- 
erature tends to sanity of mind, and to keep the 
Caliban of common sense, a very useful monster 
in his proper place, from making himself king 
over us. It is a study of order, proportion, ar- 
rangement, of the highest and purest Reason. It 



126 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

teaches that chance has less to do with success 
than forethought, will, and work." 

For all the seeming fortuity of much of 
Lowell's teaching, it was, all things considered, 
markedly successful, and the spring of its suc- 
cess was " forethought, will, and work." 

From the first days of his academic career, 
Lowell gave himself to arduous and persistent 
study, often working all night and only going 
to bed for a brief sleep with the earliest pipe of 
the birds. Up to 1856, he had been an intermit- 
tent, omnivorous reader and curious interpreter 
of old books. He now began to attain to a little 
more consistent and elaborate scholarship. 

Lowell, it is needless to say at this hour, was 
never quite a scholar m the German sense of the 
word, nor even in the modern American academic 
sense: but he was a scholar in what we may 
perhaps think a more admirable sense, — that in 
which the bookmen of the Renaissance were so. 
Like Dryden, he " never read anything except 
for pleasure," but save for certain types of mod- 
ern fiction, there was little that he could not, and 
did not, read with delight. He had the old-time 
scholar's deep imaginative perception of the 
unity and coherence of this various old world. 
Nothing human was alien from him, nothing 
outworn ; he sought the ineffaceable vestiges of 
humanity as keenly, almost, in his old French 



PROFESSOR AND EDITOR 127 

texts or New England sermons as in the "Divine 
Comedy" or "Don Quixote." 

Through his spectacles of books, Lowell saw 
life steadily, and saw it whole ; and it is here 
that his learning comes most directly into opposi- 
tion to modern specialized scholarship. He had 
his dislikes in literature, no man more ; but few 
men have ever viewed the literature of Europe 
in all its periods more wisely, genially, and com- 
prehensively. In his more elaborate essays upon 
the great English and Continental writers, his 
swift intuition — grounded, as it was, upon wide 
reading and ripe meditation — led him to many 
novel generalizations upon the interaction of 
national literatures, or the organic relation of 
literary periods, one to another, that have since 
become the commonplaces of comparative scholar- 
ship. Of the jealousies and contempts of the 
modern specialists — the Mediae valist for the 
Renaissance man, and the Renaissance man for 
the student of more modern literature — he had 
nothing ; and when in his last years these began 
to emerge in American scholarship, no man han- 
dled them more caustically than Lowell. 

But for all his range and discursiveness, 
Lowell made himself a more minute and punc- 
tilious scholar than has always been recognized. 
Of that unprofitable type of scholarship brought 
iuto fashion by young Germans, interpreting 



128 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

poetry by the aid of a table of Logarithms in 
lieu of a Poetics, or tracking an "Einfluss" that 
perhaps in nine cases out of ten has no more 
substantial existence than an Irish snake, Lowell 
was impatient ; yet there were few doctoral 
theses published within his field that he did not 
at least glance through, to see if perchance any- 
thing of significance had strayed or been conveyed 
into them. 

It was as a philologist and student of linguis- 
tics that Lowell came nearest to technical schol- 
arship. He was never at much pains to consider 
scientifically the operation of what are called 
" sound laws," and he was never quite abreast 
of the authoritative philological scholarship of 
his day. For this reason it is not difficult, in the 
light of more recent information, to find mistakes 
in his comments on the derivation and history 
of words. But the happy hits and shrewd obser- 
vations are far more frequent than the errors. 
He had an extraordinary verbal memory, and 
the cling of a picturesque word or phrase to his 
imagination was very tenacious. It is this keen 
tasting of the flavor of words and this unusually 
ample knowledge of their actual use in the litera- 
tures of half a dozen countries, added to the poet's 
sense of word values, that give a special interest 
to Lowell's linguistic remarks in such papers as 
that upon the " Library of Old Authors " or his 



PROFESSOR AND EDITOR 129 

introduction to the second series of the " BIglow 
Papers." 

In the course of the latter part of his life 
Lowell collected a library of some seven hundred 
volumes dealing with old French literature — no 
inconsiderable aggregate. These were left by his 
will to the library of Harvard University, and 
are now kept there as a special collection. One 
who would know the real character of Lowell's 
scholarship has but to turn the pages of these 
volumes and peruse the notes upon their fly- 
leaves. Verbal references and queries of deriva- 
tion are frequent ; but the more common type of 
note — written usually in French when the text 
is French, sometimes in Latin when the text is 
Latin — deals with some quaint human touch 
which else might be lost in a great Sahara of 
repetitious narrative. He habitually annotated 
those passages of wistful pathos or lively humor 
which help to make misty old days live again in 
a scholar's imagination. In 1889, two years be- 
fore his death, he said of his study of Old French, 
'' I cannot see exactly what good it has done me 
or anybody else." This, however, was but a pass- 
ing cynicism, for he knew perfectly well, as we 
know now, that it had contributed to give his 
historical imagination both breadth and solidity 
of foundations. 

In short, Lowell admirably fulfilled the ideal 



130 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

of the scholar set forth in a lecture upon " The 
First Need of American Culture," part of which 
was printed in the " Harvard Crimson " for May 
4, 1894 : " True scholarship consists in knowing 
not what things exist, but what they mean ; it is 
not memory but judgment. It is the foundation 
of true criticism. And the advantage of a proper 
cultivation of the critical faculty is that it helps 
us to composure, to self-possession, those things 
above all others desirable." 

But Lowell was a reader and a bookman as 
well as a scholar ; and the topic of Lowell as a 
bookman is worth a moment's discussion here, 
for it was in these four years spent in the back 
den in the house on Professors' Row, and in the 
sixteen years following, in which he was at home 
among his books at Elmwood, that Lowell did 
most of that infinite reading that made him, as 
he said, " one of the last great readers " of the 
world, and gave so buxom a charm to the series 
of bookish essays which appeared during these 
years. His letters from 1857 onward are full of 
references to this constant, voluminous reading, 
among which allusions to his perusal of queer, 
out-of-the-way books are no less frequent than his 
incidental mention of his reading of long sets of 
the works of great writers. " Among books, cer- 
tainly," he said, " there is much variety of com- 
pany, ranging from the best to the worst — from 



PROFESSOR AND EDITOR 131 

Plato to Zola," and he habitually sought the best, 
though at times he was not at all averse to the 
company of the worst. In one letter he observes 
casually, " I read Euripides through last winter 
and took a great fancy to him." It is worth set- 
ting down with this that in the very last year of 
his life he read Terence throuofh. This read in": 
of authors " through " was always a habit of his. 
Mention of his particular joy in Calderon is con- 
stantly recurring. In a letter written to Miss 
Norton in 1874 we find an account of a charac- 
teristic segment of his reading : — 

" I have been at work, and really hard at work, 
in making books that I had read and marked 
really useful by indexes of all peculiar words 
and locutions. I have finished in this way since 
I came home, Golding's ' Ovid,' Warner's ' Al- 
bion's England,' Laing's and the Thornton 
' Metrical Romances,' the ' Chevalier au Lion ; ' 
and yesterday in eight unbroken hours I did 
Barbour's * Brus.' Then I have been reading 
many volumes of the Early English Text So- 
ciety's series in the same thorough way. A pro- 
fessor, you know, must be learned, if he cannot 
be anything else, and I have now reached tlie 
point where I feel sure enough of myself in Old 
French and Old English to make my corrections 
with a pen instead of a pencil as I go along. 
Ten hours a day, on an average, I have been at 



132 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

it tor the last two months, and get so absorbed 
that I turn grudgingly to anything else. My 
only other reading has been Mr. Sibley's book of 
' Harvard Graduates,' which is as unillumined, 
dry, and simple, as the 14th century prose of 
the Early English Texts. But it interests me 
and makes me laugh. It is the prettiest rescue 
of prey from Oblivion I ever saw. The gallant 
librarian, like a knight-errant, slays this giant, 
who carries us all captive sooner or later, and 
then delivers his prisoners. There are ninety- 
seven of them by tale, and as he fishes them out 
of those dismal oubliettes they come up dripping 
with the ooze of Lethe like Curll from his dive 
in the Thames, like him also gallant competitors 
for the crown of Dulness. It is the very balm 
of authorship. No matter how far you may be 
gone under, if you are a graduate of Harvard 
College you are sure of being dredged up again 
and handsomely buried, with a catalogue of your 
works to keep you down." ^ 

The kind of work reported above, spasmodic 
as it may sometimes have been, goes to show 
that Lowell had, for the time, pretty well won 
the upper hand of *' the Spence negligence.'* 
For a man of Lowell's temperament as much 
energy of will, as much overcoming of organic 
inhibitions, was needed to attempt and carry 
1 Letters, vol. ii, pp. 343, 344. 



PROFESSOR AND EDITOR 133 

through that piece of work on Barbour's " Brus " 
as would have taken a city. 

If there was one thing that Lowell loved any- 
where near so well as reading books, it was talk- 
ing about them. All the most vivid pictures that 
we have of him in his library mention this trait. 
When Leslie Stephen called on him in the war 
times he found at first sight " a singularly com- 
plete specimen of the literary recluse," and he 
goes on to say of Lowell in his library : " The 
great lights of literature were there too, of 
course, and would suggest occasional flashes of 
the playful or penetrative criticism which is so 
charming in his writings, and which was yet 
more charming as it came quick from the brain." 
And Mr. Howells has witnessed to the same 
thing : " When he quoted anything from a book, 
he liked to get it and read the passage over, as 
if he tasted a kind of hoarded sweetness in the 
words." 

So for the twenty years from 1857 onward, 
despite Lowell's engagements with his classes at 
Harvard and despite those editorial avocations 
of which we shall presently have to speak, his 
real vocation was with the five thousand vol- 
umes that made up his library. Both winter and 
summer he sat among them, comfortably pro- 
vided with pipe and velvet jacket, reading, read- 
ing, — now going to the shelves to turn the pages 



134 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

of some brown yellow-leaved volume, with that 
" practised finger " that to the books " seemed 
like a brain ; " now laying aside the open volume 
face down for some minutes or hours of discur- 
sive talk with an acceptable caller. If, as Arnold 
said, " A man's life of each day depends for its 
solidity and value on whether he read during that 
day, and far more still, on what he reads during 
it," how full and rich must have been Lowell's 
life in those years. That it was so we can dis- 
cover from his letters, for those that were written 
during this period are the happiest and most 
characteristic of his life. 

It is perhaps in this role of the bookman among 
his books that the true lover of LoweU likes best 
to think of him — sitting among the books and 
birds of Elm wood, in such a mood as that which 
he has expressed in " Fancy's Casuistry," evoked 
by the sound of the Cambridge firebells : — 

" But on my far-off solitude 
No harsh alarums can intrude ; 
The terror comes to me subdued 

And charmed by distance, 
To deepen the habitual mood 

Of my existence. 

" Are those, I muse, the Easter chimes ? 
And listen, weaving careless rhymes 
While the loud city's griefs and crimes 
Pay gentle allegiance 



PROFESSOR AND EDITOR 135 

To the fine quiet that sublimes 
These dreamy regions." 



But though this was his most habitual and his 
deepest mood, Lowell could never have been what 
he seemed at first to Stephen, the " singularly 
complete specimen of the literary recluse." He 
was often in the open, walking to his favorite 
Beaver Brook at Waverley, or to the Waverley 
Oaks, whose wide-spreading, gnarled branches 
give to the glade which they surround a singular 
effect of artistically disposed nature, and whose 
Corot-like sentiment was a frequent symbol in 
his poetry. 

In winter time he found congenial relaxa- 
tion in the meetings of a famous Whist Club, 
composed of Lowell, Carter, John Holmes, and 
Dr. Estes Howe, an organization seemingly more 
notable for its concert of wit, than for silent de- 
votion to the cards. Beginning with the summer 
of 1857, he took each year a brief vacation trip 
to the Adirondacks, in company with the cele- 
brated " Adirondack Club," of which Mr. Still- 
man was the excellent historian in many maga- 
zine sketches, and which was immortalized in 
Emerson's poem. Here Lowell entered with zest 
into the free life of the woods. He was not a 
very persistent fisherman ; and this one might 
expect as corresponding with those defects in 



136 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

quietude and simplicity which occasionally ap- 
pear in his poetry and prose. But he was, as all 
the reporters agree, a good swimmer and an ex- 
cellent rifle shot — though he characteristically 
proposed to require the members of the Adiron- 
dack Club to shoot deer with the bow and arrow. 

2. The Atlantic Monthly. 

So early as 1853, Mr. F. H. Underwood, the 
"literary adviser," as the quaint phrase is, of 
the firm of Jewett and Company, publishers, of 
Boston, had conceived the idea of establishing a 
new literary magazine which should at once play 
its part in the reform movements, which then 
held the stage, and carry the best of the litera- 
ture that was then making in New England. He 
even went so far as to solicit Lowell's aid in the 
enterprise, but for four years nothing came of it. 
When, however, Underwood in 1857 transferred 
his allegiance to Phillips, Sampson and Com- 
pany, he took up the enterprise anew, with the 
active cooperation of Mrs. Stowe, whose books 
had been taken over from Jewett and Company 
by his new employers. Soon he had his project 
fairly launched. On the 5th of May, 1857, Mr. 
Phillips gave the famous dinner at the Parker 
House at which " The Atlantic Monthly " came 
into being. Those present, beside Mr. Phillips 
and Mr. Underwood, were Emerson, Holmes, 



PROFESSOR AND EDITOR 137 

Cabot, Motley, Longfellow, and Lowell. The 
plan broached at this time found hearty favor 
with all. Messrs. Phillips and Sampson under- 
took the publication of the magazine, which, 
at the happy suggestion of Dr. Holmes, was 
christened " The Atlantic Monthly." Lowell was 
appointed editor, and Underwood was to fill a 
position on it combining the functions of busi- 
ness manager and assistant editor. After some 
months of preparation, the first number of the 
" Atlantic " appeared in November, 1857, in a 
format and dress of type not unlike that which it 
wears to-day. 

From the first Lowell made an admirable ed- 
itor. Despite the arduousness of combining the 
two professions of professor and editor, he con- 
trived to give his freshest hours to the " Atlan- 
tic," and to impress upon it a stamp of his 
many-sided personality which it has never wholly 
lost. Before accepting the editorship, he had 
stipulated that Dr. Holmes should be engaged 
as a regular contributor. As " The Autocrat of 
the Breakfast-Table " began to appear in the 
first number, to be followed by " The Poet at 
the Breakfast-Table," the magazine was marked 
from the outset by that engaging urbanity of 
which Holmes was so complete a master. Al- 
though the continuous contributions of Holmes 
did more, perhaps, than anything else to give 



138 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

the " Atlantic " its individual quality and charm, 
there was nothing in any of the early numbers 
that was not in harmonious concert. For all of 
Lowell's bookishness, whimsicality, and poetry, 
he had a shrewd editorial faculty, which, as we 
have seen, had already proved its effectiveness 
in the three numbers of the " Pioneer." He had 
a clear, practical sense of the qualities which 
alone could make the " Atlantic " successful, and 
he founded a tradition for the magazine which 
all of its succeeding editors have endeavored 
in some measure to live up to. He was fortu- 
nate, of course, in having a clientele of writers 
already intimately associated with himself, who 
could write with all the telling scholarship of 
those similar groups that made "Blackwood's" 
and some other English reviews so remark- 
able, — men who could write without falling 
a prey to that laborious solemnity which has 
so often dogged the pens of even the ablest 
Americans when they turn themselves to maga- 
zine composition. Lowell's " Atlantic " — with 
its contributions from Dr. Holmes, Emerson, 
Whit tier, Longfellow, Clough, Thoreau, Mrs. 
Stowe, Colonel Higginson, Mr. Norton, Mr. 
Trowbridge, Mr. Aldrich, Mr. Howells, the ed- 
itor himself, and a score of less known men in 
England and America — was always readable, 
yet never superficial ; gay, but not flippant ; edi- 



PROFESSOR AND EDITOR 139 

fying, but not dull. As time went on and the 
shadows of the Civil War darkened over the 
country, the prevailing tone of the " Atlantic " 
grew more earnest and weighty, but it never lost 
its readableness and literary charm. 

The effects of his editorial labors in Lowell's 
life were various. His salary at first was twenty- 
five hundred dollars a year, — with an additional 
stipend of six dollars a page for his own contri- 
butions, — and later this was increased to three 
thousand dollars. This, in addition to his modest 
salary as professor at Harvard, and his own 
slight means, gave him a freedom from financial 
narrowness that he had never before enjoyed, 
and made it possible for him to add more rapidly 
and consistently to his library, and to live a 
broader life in many ways. 

On the whole, too, — at least at first, — he 
took the thousand worries and pitfalls of an 
editor's life with a certain detachment and 
high spirits that kept them from fretting him. 
The volume of his work was very considerable. 
Some five hundred manuscripts were sent to the 
" Atlantic " every month, and the typewriter was 
still unknown. Though Lowell had some assist- 
ance in the reading from Mr. Underwood, and 
later from Mr. Howard Ticknor, and was also 
helped by these gentlemen in the necessary vo- 
luminous correspondence with authors, he seems 



140 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

not to have been content without reading and 
rereading a large portion of all this " pen-and- 
inkubus " himself. He revised all the copy for 
each number, often very minutely and subtilely,^ 
and read every line of the proof. He seems in 
some other respects not to have been a very 
punctilious and systematic editor ; occasionally, 
even, he lost manuscript, — from the point of 
view of the contributor a heinous offense ; some- 
times, too, he was remiss in promptitude of cor- 
respondence. But remembering the volume of 
work which confronted him, and remembering 
that he had no aid from what is called in Low- 
ellese a " womanuensis," he did marvelously 
well. As time went on, however, he grew weary 
of the unrelenting pressure of his editorial work, 
as well as of the necessity for conciliation and 

1 From Thoreau's " Chesuneook," which ran through three 
numbers of the magazuie in 1858, Lowell struck out this sen- 
tence, referring to a pine-tree, " It is as immortal as I am, and 
perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above 
me still." Thoreau considered this beyond the bounds of the 
editorial prerogative, and refused to let Lowell have " The 
AUegash and the East Branch," which was to have followed 
" Chesuncook " in the Atlantic. This seems to have caused the 
publishers some annoyance. Lowell's action was doubtless 
influenced by his desire to anger no further the orthodox reli- 
gionists, who had already been much disturbed by some pas- 
sages in the Autocrat. Moreover, while the sentence contained 
a doctrine that Lowell as a poet often gave expression to, it 
was precisely the kind of thing over which his own poetic and 
critical faculties were constantly at war. 



PROFESSOR AND EDITOR 141 

compromise with his publishers. No conscien- 
tious editor can escape a constant sense of a 
fourfold responsibility, — to his readers, to his 
writers, to his owners, and to himself. In prac- 
tice the resolution of the four may not be 
easy, and Lowell seems to have had his share 
of such trouble. He wrote to Mr. Norton in 
1858: — 

" I am resolved that no motives of my own 
comfort or advantage shall influence me, but I 
hate the turmoil of such affairs, despise the no- 
toriety they give me, and long for the day wlien 
I can be vacant to the muses and to my books 
for their own sakes." 

With the exception of some notable poems, — 
" The Origin of Didactic Poetry," " The Dead 
House," " Italy, 1859," and '' L'Envoi : To the 
Muse," — and some important political articles 
to be considered in the next chapter, Lowell's 
own contributions to the '' Atlantic " consisted 
chiefly of numerous and careful notices of con- 
temporary books. He had, as might be expected, 
a rigorous ideal of the criticism of contemporary 
literature. The forty-odd review articles which 
he printed in the " Atlantic " during the period 
of his editorship show flashes of his inextinguish- 
able wit and passages of his characteristic savory 
prose ; but in the main they are specimens of 
that painstaking, fully informed, cutting criti- 



142 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

cism of which the reviews in the London " Athe- 
naeum " were for long the finest type. 

Bound as he was by professorial and editorial 
assiduities, Lowell's life in the years from 1857 
to 1860 was lived largely in his study. Each 
morning he walked from his house on Kirkland 
Street to the river, and down a winding, pic- 
turesque path to the Riverside Press, to read his 
proof and mail. Then he would return to his den, 
where he was likely to sit among his books and 
manuscripts till far into the night, save when he 
must needs go to the college across the street to 
lecture or to hear a handful of youths recite their 
allotment of Dante or Cervantes. Thence he 
would soon be back again in his study to light 
his pipe, " thank God that he had done a day's 
work," and so to reading again. 

His chief social pleasure and relaxation in 
these years was at the monthly dinners of the 
famous Saturday Club, which had been initiated 
some years before by the meetings of one or two 
friends with Emerson at an early dinner at the 
Albion on Saturday, the day on which it was 
his habit to come to Boston. By 1859 this little 
group of choice minds had taken definite form 
as a dining club. Here Lowell could meet with 
Holmes, Longfellow, Emerson, Agassiz, Haw- 
thorne, and others of less eminence, in the smoky 
atmosphere that Thoreau on the occasion of his 



PROFESSOR AND EDITOR 143 

single visit found so intolerable, for a monthly 
exercitation in wise and witty converse. In his 
noble ode on the death of Agassiz, Lowell has 
described these jocund meetings, — 

" When Saturday her monthly banquet spread 

To scholars, poets, wits, 
All choice, some famous, loving things, not names, 
And so without a twinge at others' fames ; 
Such company as wisest moods befits, 
Yet with no pedant blindness to the worth 

Of undeliberate mirth. 
Natures benignly mixed of air and earth, 
Now with the stars, and now with equal zest 
Tracing the eccentric orbit of a jest." 

In this congenial circle, Lowell, by reason of 
his various powers, his readiness, and his posi- 
tion as the editor of the magazine which mostly 
carried the writings of the Club, was a chief and 
principal figure. The Club admired and loved 
him, and he, it is said, cared more for what the 
Club might think of any piece of his writing 
than for any other criticism or popularity. 

On his fortieth birthday, February 22, 1859, 
the Saturday Club held a special celebration. 
Among the tributes in prose and verse that were 
read upon that occasion was a poem by Emerson 
which does not appear in his works. It is of 
peculiar dramatic interest in its foreshadowing 
of the part that Lowell was to play during that 
great war of which the distant thunder was al- 



144 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

ready heard. In this poem the Sibyl called on 
to tell Lowell's fortune answers, " Strength for 
the hour ! " Then follow these verses : — - 

" Man of marrow, man of mark, 
Virtue lodged in sinew stark, 
Rich supplies, and never stinted, 
More behind as need is hinted : 
Never cumbered with the morrow, 
Never knew corroding sorrow ; 
Too well gifted to have found 
Yet his opulence's bound; 
Most at home in mounting fun, 
Broadest joke and luckiest pun, 
Masking in the mantling tones 
Of a rich laughter-loving voice, 
In speeding troops of social joys. 
And in volleys of wild mirth, 
Purer metal, rarest worth, 
Logic, passion, cordial zeal. 
Such as bard and martyr feel. 



But, if another temper come. 

If on the sun shall creep a gloom, 

A time and tide more exigent. 

When the old mounds are torn and rent, 

More proud, more stormy competitors 

Marshal the list for emperors, — 

Then the pleasant bard will know 

To put the frolic masque behind him 

Like an old familiar cloak, 

And in sky-born mail to bind him, 

And single-handed cope with Time, 

And parry and deal the Thunder-stroke.*' 



PROFESSOR AND EDITOR 145 

Up to 1860 Lowell had not quite put his frolic 
masque behind him, though we can trace in his 
mood a growing seriousness and gravity. In 1860 
Mr. Howells came to see him with a worn letter 
accepting a poem for the " Atlantic " in a pocket 
over his heart. He found him " a bit of a disci- 
plinarian," and goes on to say : — 

" At the first encounter with people he always 
was apt to have a certain frosty shyness, a smil- 
ing cold, as from the long high-sunned winters 
of his Puritan race ; he was not quite himself 
until he had made you aware of his quality ; then 
no one could be sweeter, tenderer, warmer, than 
he. Then he made you free of his whole heart ; 
but you must be his captive before he could do 
that." 

In January, 1861, the Reverend Charles 
Lowell died, and Lowell moved back again to 
Elmwood. As he writes to Briggs in March, 
1861 : " You will see by my date that I am back 
again in the place I love best. I am sitting in 
my old garret, at my old desk, smoking my old 
pipe, and loving my old friends. I begin already 
to feel more like my old self than I have these 
ten years." So it was at Elmwood, with its 
memories of his early poetic days, and of happy 
fighting in the abolition cause, that Lowell played 
that great part in the time of his country's tra- 
vail which must be the subject of the next chapter. 



CHAPTER IV 

PUBLIC MAN AND CRITIC 
1861-1876 

1. Lowell and the War of the Rebellion. 

Writing to Thomas Hughes in September, 1859, 
Lowell speaks, not without a certain compla- 
cency, of twelve years of cloistered studies that 
have alienated him very much from contempo- 
rary politics. The alienation, however, was more 
fanciful than real ; with all his business of teach- 
ing and editing, with all his long wandering in 
bookish realms of gold, with all his jocund hours 
of friendly fellowship, he had never ceased to 
brood over the issues of national righteousness. 
If, for a time, the poet-militant in him seemed 
to slumber, deep was the passion of that sleep, 
and when he awakened to the drums and tram- 
pling of civil war it was to chant his noblest 
measures. 

His growth in these years of " cloistered 
studies " exemplified precisely the course fore- 
shadowed in that " L'Envoi : To the Muse " 
which he wrote in 1859. He had in earlier years 



PUBLIC MAN AND CRITIC 147 

followed the flying feet of the Muse through the 
lovely ways of Nature ; his young ear had heard 
her fresh music blown through 

" Mountains, forests, open downs, 
Lakes, railroads, prairies, states, and towns;" 

he had felt her "rhythmic presence fleet and 
rare," in Senate-hall and court, — 

" Making the Mob a moment fine 
With glimpses of their own Divine ; " 

above all he had felt her graciousness at home, 

" With that sweet serious undertone 
Of duty, music all her own." 

Now he was to fulfill the Muse's behest, — 

" The epic of a man rehearse, 
Be something better than thy verse." 

So in losing himself, he was, poetically, to find 
himself. 

In August, 1859, Mr. Phillips, of the firm of 
Phillips and Sampson, died, and soon after the 
business went into the hands of an assignee. A 
few months later some of the more important 
copyrights of Phillips, Sampson and Company, 
and the " Atlantic Monthly " were bought by 
the distinguished publishing house of Ticknor 
and Fields. Lowell continued for a time in the 
editorial chair, but in the course of a couple of 



148 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

years it seemed better to the owners that Mr. 
Fields, who was peculiarly qualiified for the post 
by his intimate relation to the best writers of 
the day, should assume the editorship in person. 
Ill May, 1861, Lowell gave up the position with 
cheerful regret. 

" I wish you all joy of your worm," he wrote 
to Fields. " You will find it no bad apprentice- 
ship or prelude for that warmer and more con- 
genial world to which all successful publishers 
are believed by devout authors to go. I was 
going to say I was glad to be rid of my old man 
of the sea. But I don't believe I am. I doubt 
if we see the finger of Providence so readily in 
the stoppage of salary as in its beginning or in- 
crement. ... I wish to say in black and white 
that I am perfectly satisfied with the arrange- 
ments you have made. You will be surprised 
before long to find how easily you get on with- 
out me, and wonder that you ever thought me 
a necessity. It is amazing how quickly the 
waters close over one. He carries down with him 
the memory of his splash and struggle, and 
fancies it is still going on when the last bubble 
even has burst long ago." ^ 

Lowell continued to be a regular contributor 
to the " Atlantic " in verse and prose until 1864. 
In January, 1864, he began to edit the " North 

^ Letter Sf vol. ii, pp. 58, 59. 



i 



PUBLIC MAN AND CRITIC 149 

American Keview," jointly with Mr. Norton ; 
thenceforward most of his literary and political 
papers appeared in this journal. In those days 
the " North American " was a Boston quarterly 
of a prodigious gravity. The new editors gave 
it fresh distinction and readableness. Mr. Nor- 
ton was the active editor, and the new editorial 
connection was chiefly momentous to Lowell in 
still further solidifying his position as a public 
man, and in affording him a vehicle for literary 
essays of a scope and amplitude that even the 
" Atlantic " would have found " unmagazin- 
able," as the slang of editorial offices puts it. 

His own life at Elmwood flowed in the old 
equable course, though its waters ran deep, and, 
for all the rippling play of humor on the surface, 
were fed from bitter springs. Three of his 
nephews, Charles Russell Lowell, James Jack- 
son Lowell, and William Lowell Putnam, went 
to the war. Lieutenant Putnam was killed in the 
front of battle at Ball's Bluff in October, 1861 ; 
Lieutenant James Jackson Lowell was mortally 
wounded at Glendale, Virginia, in June, 1862 ; 
and Charles Russell Lowell, who rose to the rank 
of Brigadier General, died in October, 1864, 
from wounds received at the battle of Cedar 
Creek. No sorrow since the death of his children 
and the wife of his youth had touched Lowell so 
nearly as this. 



150 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

He still found refreshment in nature, comfort 
in his various work, and relaxation in friendly- 
converse and letter writing ; but his deepest 
joy in those dark years must have been in the 
expression of the war-time mood that gave 
us his best political essays, " The Washers of 
the Shroud," the second series of the "Biglow 
Papers," and the " Commemoration Ode." 

Although the burden of the first series of the 
" Biglow Papers " had been a plea for peace in 
a time of what seemed to Lowell unrighteous 
war, he was never a supine peace lover ; and 
even at the time he was writing such lines as — 

" Ez fer war, I call it murder, — 
There you hev it plain an' flat ; 
I don't want to go no furder 
Than my Testy ment fer that," 

he could still, in his Palfrey poem, mention the 
advantages of a " whiff of Naseby." In 1857, 
after the Dred Scott decision, he wrote to Mr. 
Norton : " So now the lists are open, and we 
shall soon find Vv^here the tougher lance-shafts 
are grown, North or South." He did not at that 
time, of course, foresee the purging tragedy of 
war that the country was to undergo, but he 
was keenly aware of the momentousness of the 
things that were at stake in America, and of the 
magnitude of the approaching crisis. In 1858 
he printed in the *' Atlantic " four very notable 



PUBLIC MAN AND CRITIC 151 

political articles : " Mr. Buchanan's Administra- 
tion," in April ; " The American Tract Society," 
in July; ''The Pocket Celebration of the 
Fourth," in August ; and " A Sample of Con- 
sistency," in November. In 1859 his preoccupa' 
tions were more with pure literature, and he 
wrote no prose articles dealing with the situa- 
tion, although his deepening mood may be seen 
in his poem, " Italy, 1859," which appeared in 
the December number of that year. In 1860 he 
returned to the attack with an article on " The 
New Tariff Bill," in the " Atlantic " for July, 
an admirable paper upon " The Election in No- 
vember," in the October number, and in the last 
number for the year "A Plea for Freedom 
from Speech and Figures of Speech-Makers," in 
which he made some untimely fun of Wendell 
Phillips, under the name of Philip Vandel. In 
1861, after the war had at last been precipi- 
tated, he published four political papers in the 
" Atlantic : " " The Question of the Hour," " E 
Pluribus Unum," " The Pickens-and-Stealin's 
Rebellion," and " Self-Possession vs. Preposses- 
sion ; " and in November of that year he printed 
in the " Atlantic " one of the noblest of his war 
poems, " The Washers of the Shroud." Written 
as it was in a week of sharp anxiety for his be- 
loved nephews at the front, this breathes for the 
first time the full depth of Lowell's patriotic 



152 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

passion. In its sonorous penultimate stanza we 
see how wholly he was rapt by the stern aspira- 
tion of the war : — 

" * God, give us peace ! not such as lulls to sleep, 
But sword on thigh, and brow with purpose knit I 
And let our Ship of State to harbor sweep, 
Her ports all up, her battle-lanterns lit, 
And her leashed thunders gathering for their leap 1 ' " 

For the two years from 1862 to 1864 Lowell's 
writing upon the war was confined to the second 
series of the " Biglow Papers," which appeared 
in the "Atlantic Monthly," his "Two Scenes 
from the Life of Blondel," and the memorial 
poem to Shaw ; but when he undertook the ed- 
itorship of the "North American Review" in 
1864, he began again to deal with the issues of 
the day in prose. In that year he printed in the 
" North American Review : " " The President's 
Policy," "McClellan's Report," "The Rebel- 
lion : Its Causes and Consequences," and " The 
Next General Election," afterward entitled 
"McClellan or Lincoln?" In 1865 he wrote 
for the " Review " his thoughtful paper on " Re- 
construction," and " Scotch the Snake or Kill 
It ; " and in the following year " The President 
on the Stump " and " The Seward-Johnson Re- 
action." 

This completes the tale of Lowell's war-time 
writing in prose. These articles, only a small 



PUBLIC MAN AND CRITIC 153 

part of which were reprinted in his volume of 
" Political Essays," are certainly the most stimu- 
lating and brilliant group of political papers 
that American literature has to show. They 
bear in some respects a curious likeness to 
his first political writing in the " Anti-Slavery 
Standard " fifteen years earlier, though they 
show a remarkable growth in power and precision 
of workmanship. He is still not always able to 
control his wit and fancy ; but it is seldom that 
he is led into an ineffective jeu d^ esprit or ex- 
cursus. His humor is more often of a delight- 
fully warm and persuasive cast, as where he 
writes in his scathing examination of McClel- 
lan's report that " the dear old domestic bird, 
the Public, which lays the golden eggs out of 
which greenbacks are hatched, was sure she had 
brooded out an eagle chick at last." Such glows 
of humor alternate with flights of imaginative 
eloquence of the most stirring kind, in which 
the analogical faculty of the poet finds expres- 
sion in some heightened similitude. What, for 
example, could be better than this of Lincoln ? 

" The imputation of inconsistency is one to 
which every sound politician and every honest 
thinker must sooner or later subject himself. 
The foolish and the dead alone never change 
their opinion. The course of a great statesman 
resembles that of navigable rivers, avoiding im- 



164 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

movable obstacles with noble bends of conces- 
sion, seeking the broad levels of opinion on 
which men soonest settle and longest dwell, fol- 
lowing and marking almost imperceptible slopes 
of national tendency, yet always aiming at direct 
advances, always recruited from sources nearer 
heaven, and sometimes bursting open paths of 
progress and fruitful human commerce through 
what seemed the eternal barriers of both." 

Perhaps the single most instructive pheno- 
menon running through all these political essays 
is Lowell's growing appreciation of the great- 
ness of Lincoln. At his nomination Lowell, like 
nearly all the Boston and Cambridge men, re- 
gretted that Seward had not been the candidate, 
and in the first months of the war Lincoln's 
" noble bends of concession " ill suited Lowell's 
ardent hope of sudden victory and pacification. 
But it was not long before the poet's intuition 
divined the true nature of the great man at 
Washington. As he proudly boasted twenty 
years later, he was the first of his circle to see 
that here indeed was one of Plutarch's men. As 
soon as Lowell found himself more warmly in 
sympathy with the policy of the administration, 
his political writing in prose gained perceptibly 
in earnestness and efficiency. Taken as a whole, 
his articles, with all their wealth of literary 
background and with all their personal flavor of 



PUBLIC MAN AND CRITIC 155 

whimsicality, embody perfectly the Lincolnian 
mood ; for while they are winged with a mysti- 
cal democracy which often carries their author 
to a lofty Pisgah of political vision, they always 
come back to the ideal of a conservative demo- 
cracy grounded upon an " allegiance to the sober 
will of the majority, concentrated in established 
forms and distributed by legitimate channels." 

But important as was Lowell's prose writing 
during the years of the struggle for the Union, 
his war poetry was more important still. It was 
in the second series of " Biglow Papers " and in 
the *' Commemoration Ode " that he expressed 
the whole heart of the North and performed the 
greatest public service. To understand aright 
the mood of the " Biglow Papers," second series, 
we must remember that fusion of ideality and 
racy humor which made Lowell's idiosyncrasy. 
At the very time, for example, when he was 
writing with the most earnest emotion of the 
stern issues of war, he wrote to a friend, after 
dining with a distinguished French visitor, in 
such a vein of pure fooling as this : — 

"I sat next to Colonel Ragon, who led the 
forlorn hope at the taking of Malakoff and was 
at the siege of Rome. He was a very pleasant 
fellow. (I don't feel quite sure of my English 
yet — J'ai tant parle Fran^ais que je trouv6' 



156 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

beaiicoup de difficulte a m'y deshabituer.) Pen- 
dant — I mean during — the dinner Ooendel 
Homes rdcitait des vers vraiment jolis. II ar- 
rivait deja au bout, quand M. Eagon, se tour- 
naut vers moi d'un air mele d'intelligence et 
d'interrogation, et a la meme fois d'un Colomb 
qui fait la decouverte d'un monde tout nouveau, 
s'ecria, ' C'est en vers, Monsieur, n'est-ce pas ? ' 
St'anegdot charmang j'ai rahcontay ah Ooendel 
daypwee, avec days eclah de reer." And in 1862 
he could still play " bat, bat, come into my hat " 
of an evening on the lawn. It was this many- 
sidedness, sometimes, perhaps, a source of weak- 
ness in him, that made possible so rare a work 
as the second series of the " Biglow Papers." 

After Mr. Fields assumed the editorship of 
the " Atlantic " in 1861, he was continually 
urging Lowell to send him poetry, and he sec- 
onded a suojorestion that had been made before 
that it would be greatly to the advantage of the 
*' Atlantic " if Parson Wilbur could be induced 
to procure more verses from Hosea Biglow. At 
first Lowell looked upon this suggestion with 
much misgiving. As he wrote to a correspondent 
when the idea was first proposed to him : — 

" As for new ' Biglow Papers,' God knows 
how I should like to write them, if they would 
only malce me as they did before. Bat I am so 
occupied and bothered that I have no time to 



PUBLIC MAN AND CRITIC 157 

broody which with me is as needful a preliminary 
to hatching anything as with a clucking hen. 
However, I am going to try my hand and see 
what will come of it." 

With his freedom from editorial occupation 
Lowell seems to have found at last a little brood- 
ing time. In the fall of 1861 he wrote the first 
paper in the new series, the letter of Birdofre- 
dura Sawin, Esq., to Mr. Hosea Biglow, which, 
with the humorously pathetic senile letter from 
Parson Wilbur, pregnant with the feeling of the 
war, appeared in the " Atlantic " for January, 
1862. For five months the following five of 
the second series of *' Biglow Papers " appeared 
without intermission. After a break of half a 
year, the " Latest Views of Mr. Biglow " ap- 
peared in the " Atlantic " for February, 1863. 
" Mr. Hosea Biglow to the Editor of the ' At- 
lantic Monthly ' " was published in April, 1865, 
and '* Mr. Hosea Biglow's Speech in March 
Meeting " in the May of 1866. The whole of the 
new series, with some augmentation, was printed 
in a volume in 1867. 

Despite Lowell's affirmation that "We hear 
no good of the posthumous Lazarus," the second 
series of the " Biglow Papers " is undoubtedly a 
riper achievement than the first. Something of 
the old boyish unction and high spirits has de- 
parted, but this is more than compensated for by 



168 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

greater variety and a higher flight. Absorbed 
by the sense of a vaster, more vital occasion, 
Lowell contrived to put his deepest and truest 
self into the prose of Parson Wilbur and the 
poetry of Hosea more effectively than he had 
been able to do at the slighter occasion of the 
Mexican War. Indeed, the second series is in 
every part more lyrical, less dramatic than the 
first. Even in Parson Wilbur's letters, Lowell 
often drops the mask of tremulous old age and 
speaks in his own proper person. In the intro- 
duction to the Mason and Slidell " Idyll," for 
instance, the greater part of the Parson's letter 
is a perfectly straightforward expression of 
LowelFs view of the attitude of England toward 
the American conflict, written, save for a slight 
recollection of his role at the end, in his own 
habitual manner. Although in the delightful 
character of the Reverend Jared Hitchcock, so 
subtly differentiated from that of Parson Wilbur, 
as well as in the specimens of Wilbur's table- 
talk, he returned again to a masterly dramatiza- 
tion of his characters, the reader of the ''Biglow 
Papers " to-day feels that Lowell is personally 
expressed in their prose no less than in their 
verse. Of the lyrical intensity of the latter there 
is little need to speak. How vividly is his true 
genius shown in such passages as that dewy ac- 
count of the coming of spring in *' Sunthin' 



PUBLIC MAN AND CRITIC 169 

in the Pastoral Line," with its charming picture 
of his best-loved bird : — 

" 'nufE sed, June's bridesman, poet o' the year, 
Gladness on wings, the bobolink, is here; 
Half-hid in tip-top apple-blooms he swings, 
Or climbs aginst the breeze with quiveriu' wings, 
Or, givin' way to 't in a mock despair, 
Runs down, a brook o' laughter, thru the air," — 

or in the stanzas of poignant sorrow for his 
nephews killed in battle : — 

" Why, hain't I held 'em on my knee ? 

Did n't I love to see 'em growin'. 
Three likely lads ez wal could be, 

Hahnsome an' brave an' not tu knowin' ? 
I set an' look into the blaze 

Whose natur', jes' like theirn, keeps climbin*, 
Ez long 'z it lives, in shinin' ways. 

An' half despise myself for rhymin'. 

" Wut 's words to them whose faith an' truth 

On War's red techstone rang true metal, 
Who ventered life an' love an' youth 

For the gret prize o' death in battle ? 
To him who, deadly hurt, agen 

Flashed on afore the charge's thunder, 
Tippin' with fire the bolt of men 

Thet rived the Rebel line asunder ? " 

So in these later " Biglow Papers " we feel 
the vital stirring of the mind of Lowell as it 
was moved by the great war ; and if they never 
had quite the popular reverberation of the first 



160 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

series, they made deeper impression, and are a 
more priceless possession of our literature. 

In April, 1865, peace was at last declared ; 
on the 13th of that month Lowell wrote to Mr. 
Norton : — 

" The news, my dear Charles, is from Heaven. 
I felt a strange and tender exaltation. I wanted 
to laugh and I wanted to cry, and ended by hold- 
ing my peace and feeling devoutly thankful. 
There is something^ mag-nificent in having^ a 
country to love. It is almost like what one feels 
for a woman. Not so tender, perhaps, but to the 
full as self-forgetful." 

Three months later on the greatest occasion of 
his life, Lowell was to give expression to this 
strange and tender exaltation in the Ode, which 
if not his most perfect, is surely his noblest and 
most splendid work. Harvard College was to hold 
on July 21 a day of memorial exercises in com- 
memoration of her ninety-three sons who had 
been killed in the War of Nationality. Lowell 
was chosen to compose and recite the chief poem 
of the day. For some weeks his Muse was back- 
ward, and he could write nothing. Then, of a 
sudden, as has been often told, the mighty mood 
of the occasion came upon him and swept him 
along so resistlessly that in two days he had 
written the entire Ode, — with the exception of 



PUBLIC MAN AND CRITIC 161 

the Lincoln strophe which was a latter addition, 
— pretty much as it now stands. As he wrote to 
Miss Norton : — 

" I eat and smoke and sleep and go through 
all the nobler functions of a man mechanically 
still, and wonder at myself as at something out- 
side of and alien to Me. For have I not worked 
myself lean on an ' Ode for Commemoration ? ' 
Was I not so rapt with the fervor of conception 
as I have not been these ten years, losing my 
sleep, my appetite, and my flesh, those attributes 
to which I before alluded as nobly uniting us in 
a common nature with our kind." ^ 

The memorial exercises of the day were of a 
sort to move men greatly. They began with a 
solemn procession, the meaning of whose sad 
march has been set forth by a young American 
historian with memorable eloquence : — 

" We should have lifted our hats in reverence 
if we had come upon the line of it. For it 
marched at a funeral pace, and the music it kept 
step by was a dirge, at once the mournf ulest and 
most exultant strain that Harvard's walls have 
ever echoed with. 

" The procession must move slowly, for there 
were halt and fever-stricken men — young men, 

1 For some curious anecdotes concerning- the composition 
and delivery of the Commemoration Ode see Scudder, voL 
ii, pp. 03-73. 



162 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

but veterans — in the ranks. It formed in a hall 
whose foundations were not yet laid when the 
pavilion of 1836 was set up on the neighboring 
slope. From old Gore Hall, the higher, western 
part of the present library, and the first building 
to arise in the new quadrangle, it moved out 
through lines of students and graduates, who in 
turn fell in behind. Colonel Henry Lee, who had 
been there in 1836 also, was at the head; after 
him walked the governor and president and guests 
and dignitaries, and then, marshaled by classes, 
the sons of Harvard who had come back alive 
from the great war for the Union. The proces- 
sion entered the old quadrangle at the corner 
between University Hall on the right and the new 
Gray's Hall on the left, turned to the right, and 
passed in front of University, as though it were 
seeking Appleton Chapel, the new place of wor- 
ship, but kept on, instead, around the quadrangle, 
out through the gate, and into the meeting house, 
where all stood waiting while Bartlett, '62, a 
major-general at twenty-five, — fittest represent- 
ative of those whom the occasion was meant to 
honor, but who could not themselves be there, 
since they lay dead on Southern fields, for he 
also had left a leg and an arm behind him, — hob- 
bled slowly down the aisle. One whom Harvard 
had won from her great rival, Yale, and who has 
often, like other captives, been set to making 



PUBLIC MAN AND CRITIC 1G3 

music for his captors, was there to direct the 
singing of new songs, and there was a fitting 
address; but what is remembered best, though 
the words are not preserved, is the prayer which 
a young clergyman, who towered up above all 
that stood to pray, Phillips Brooks, of the class 
of 1855, shook out, as was his wont, from his 
great throat, which was yet too small for the 
passion of his utterance — a matchless prayer of 
resignation and of triumph." ^ 

It was after such a prelude that Lowell arose 
to pronounce his Ode. Some in the audience 
were thrilled and shaken by it as Lowell himself 
was shaken in its delivery. Yet he seems to 
have felt with some reason that it was not a 
complete and immediate success. Nor is this 
cause for wonder. The passion of the poem was 
too ideal, its woven harmonies too subtle to be 
readily communicated to so large an audience, 
mastered and mellowed though it was by a single 
deep mood. Nor was Lowell's elocution quite 
that of the deep-mouthed odist^ capable of in- 
terpreting such organ tones of verse. But no 
sooner was the poem published with the match- 
less Lincoln strophe inserted than its greatness 
and nobility were manifest. 

1 W. G. Brown, The Foe of Compromise and other Essays, 
pp. 197, 198. 

2 " Ruit pro/undo 
Pindarus ore^'' Parson Wilbur would have recalled. 



164 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

The poetic qualities of the Ode, and its place 
among the great occasional poems of the world, 
will presently concern us ; viewing it in its place 
in Lowell's life we have but to notice how it 
swept together all that was best in him. Three 
of the ninety-three young soldiers for whom the 
old college so proudly and tenderly mourned 
were of his own blood. So his sensitive poet's 
soul, touched by personal loss, partook of the 
grief, the sorrowful elation, of half a million 
homes. His old mystical democracy, reassured 
by the outcome of the bitter trial, speaks with a 
more sure conviction, and, despite the wealth of 
subtle literary reminiscence, with a national ac- 
cent that is paralleled only in the speeches of 
Lincoln. 

It was truly a great occasion, and it sublimed 
Lowell into a great poet. In the " Commemora- 
tion Ode," his poetry, so frequently touched with 
caducity, wins to a " high immunity from night." 
Until the dream of human brotherhood is forgot- 
ten, the echo of its large music will not wholly 
die away. 

2. The North American Review. 

As the passions of the war faded, the mood 
with which Lowell looked out upon the world 
became again much what it had been seven years 
before : literary, amused, a little skeptical, but 



PUBLIC MAN AND CRITIC 165 

still ready on occasion to flame with earnest feel- 
ing. The cynical comedy of reconstruction, com- 
ing after the tragedy of war, pained him deeply ; 
but for nearly ten years he was so engaged with 
his old literary vocation that, save for a few 
caustic squibs in ''The Nation," he wrote little 
upon public affairs. His position as editor of a 
quarterly like the " North American " gave him 
an opportunity, such as no other critic in Amer- 
ica had ever enjoyed, to print literary studies of 
a spaciousness comparable to those in the Eng- 
lish " Quarterly " or the " Revue des Deux 
Mondes ; " and he made the most of his oppor- 
tunity. Now working over and combining old 
college lectures, now making some contemporary 
publication the occasion for fifteen thousand 
words or more of exposition and homily, he had 
in print by 1876 practically all of those literary 
essays which are perhaps his least corruptible 
monument. 

The tale of the essays is worth taking account 
of. In 1866 he printed in the "North American 
Review" " Carlyle's 'Frederick the Great'" 
and " Swinburne's Tragedies ; " in 1867 his 
"Rousseau and the Sentimentalists " and " Less- 
ing ; " and, as was ever his custom, he sent to 
the " Atlantic Monthly " of November in that 
year his shorter, more " magazinable " essay 
upon President Quincy, under the title of " A 



166 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

Great Public Character." In 1868 he printed in 
the " North American Review " " Witchcraft," 
" Shakespeare Once More," and "Dryden;" and 
in '' The Nation " the brief article upon Mr. 
Emerson's New Course of Lectures, which was 
afterwards expanded into one of the most ad- 
mirable of his essays. In 1869 there was a break 
in this succession of literary papers, though he 
contributed in that year " A Good Word for 
Winter " to " The Atlantic Almanac " (dated 
1870), and his telling essay " On a Certain Con- 
descension in Foreigners " to the " Atlantic 
Monthly." In 1870 the completed review of Haz- 
litt's " Library of Old Authors " ^ appeared in 

1 There will be occasion elsewhere to speak of the quality 
of Lowell's criticism as it is displayed in these essays. It may 
be noted here that the peculiar animus which is discoverable 
in the notice of the " Library of Old Authors " is not wholly 
due to the irritating errors in which that set undoubtedly 
abounded. The component single reviews of which this article 
is made up had appeared in the Atlantic and the North Ameri- 
can Review in war-time, and a part of their spirit was doubt- 
less due to Lowell's deep resentment of the attitude of Eng- 
land toward this country. As a lover of English letters whose 
mood was much colored by that of the old home, he had 
naturally felt the unfairness of England's position the more 
keenly. This perhaps led him to that relentless and cutting 
criticism which in this essay certainly passed the bounds of 
good literary manners. The same feeling undoubtedly colored 
the inadequate treatment of Carlyle in the North American 
Review in 1866. It is worth adding that Lowell wrote no let- 
ters to England between 1861 and 1866. The recently pub- 



PUBLIC MAN AND CRITIC 1G7 

the " North American Review " for April, and 
the study of " Chaucer" in the number for July. 
In the spring of that year he collected the first 
of his volumes of essays about literature in 
" Among My Books." 

In the "North American Review" for Janu- 
ary, 1871, appeared the essay on Pope ; and the 
second volume of essays, " My Study Windows," 
appeared in the fall of that year. In 1872 ap- 
peared the review of Masson's " Life of John Mil- 
ton " and Miss Rossetti's " Shadow of Dante," 
which was afterwards slightly expanded into 
what is perhaps the most amply adequate of all 
of Lowell's larger ventures in this kind. After 
a silent period of two years during which he 
was abroad, Lowell's "Spenser" was printed in 
the "North American Review" for April, 1875. 
In 1876 he published the third volume of liter- 
ary essays — the second series of " Among My 
Books." Save for his latest literary essays, pub- 
lished at the very end of his life and collected 
posthumously, the tale of his important critical 
writing is now complete. 

He did not cease to write poetry, and much of 
his most characteristic verse appeared in the 
same period. He was frequently printing poems 

lished letters o£ Ruskin to Mr. Norton show how difficult the 
estrangement of men like Ruskin and Cnrlyle made the atti- 
tude of American men of letters toward them. 



168 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

in the " Atlantic Monthly," of which some were 
collected in "Under the Willows and Other 
Poems" in 1869, some in " Heartsease and Rue" 
in 1887. In 1870 appeared " The Cathedral ; " 
in 1874 his " Agassiz ; " in 1875 his " Ode Read 
at the Concord Centennial " and " Under the Old 
Elm; " and in 1876 " An Ode for the Fourth of 
July." The last three were published together 
in his " Three Memorial Poems " in 1877. 

The reader of Lowell's letters can scarcely fail 
to discover that the ten years following the war 
were, all things considered, the happiest time of 
his life. In July, 1866, he wrote to Mr. Norton : — 

** The older I grow, the more I am convinced 
that there are no satisfactions so deep and so 
permanent as our sympathies with outward na- 
ture. I have not said just what I meant, for we 
are thrilled even more by any spectacle of hu- 
man heroism. But the others seem to bind our 
lives together by a more visible and unbroken 
chain of purifying and softening emotion. In 
this way the flowering of the buttercups is al- 
ways a great and I may truly say religious event 
in my year. But I am talking too unguardedly. 
You know what a deep distrust I have of the 
poetic temperament, with its self deceptions, its 
real unrealities, and its power of sometimes un- 
blessed magic, building its New Jerusalem in a 



PUBLIC MAN AND CRITIC 169 

sunset cloud rather than in the world of actual- 
ities and man." ^ 

It is clear that Lowell, having now turned 
himself more wholly to prose and bridled his 
poetic temperament, as it were, was finding in 
the world of actuality and man a more solid 
satisfaction than he had known before. Yet his 
quick response to the moods of nature and his 
undying poetic idealism still kept him from set- 
tling into a merely prosaic middle age. 

With that boyishness which was his lifelong 
characteristic he whimsically laments the steal- 
ing approach of age, or tries, sometimes with 
equal whimsicality, to act his role. " I have long 
been of that philosopher's opinion," he says in 
one place, " who held that nothing was of much 
consequence ; " and again, " I shall have to sub- 
side ere long into the heavy father parts. My 
very style belongs to the last century." In an- 
other place he says sadly that his wit has been 
"altered from percussion to flint." But these 
things were never quite true. For though Low- 
ell was now a middle-aged professor and critic, 
he was still Hosea Biglow as well as Parson 
Wilbur. He could still, as in his translations of 
F. J. Child's " II Pesceballo " (Anr/Uce Fishball), 
show a rollicking word jugglery little diminished 
from the days of the " Fable for Critics." No- 
1 Letters, vol. ii, p. 125. 



170 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

where does the nature of the man as it was at 
this time appear more vividly than in a reminis- 
cence of Mr. Howells's : — 

" If I dropped in upon him in the afternoon 
I was apt to find him reading the old French 
poets, or the plays of Calderon, or the ' Divina 
Commedia/ which he magnanimously supposed 
me much better acquainted with than I was be- 
cause I knew some passages of it by heart. One 
day I came in quoting 

* lo son, cantava, io son dolce Sirena, 
Che i mariuai in mezzo al mar dismago.* 

He stared at me in a rapture with the matchless 
music, and then uttered all his adoration and 
despair in one word. ' Damn ! ' he said, and no 
more. I believe he instantly proposed a walk 
that day, as though his study walls with all their 
vistas into the great literatures cramped his soul, 
liberated to a sense of the ineffable beauty of 
the sommo poeta.^^ ^ 

Perhaps, too, these were the years in which 
Lowell was most happy in his friendships. As 
he wrote to Mr. Thomas Bailey Aldrich : — 

" Think of me after I am gone on (for in the 
nature of things you will survive me) as one 
who had a really friendly feeling for everything 

1 Literary Friends and Acquaintance, New York, Harper 
& Bros. 



PUBLIC MAN AND CRITIC 171 

human. It is better to be a good fellow than a 
good poet, and perhaps (I am not sure) I might 
have showed a pretty fair talent that way with 
proper encouragement." And writing to Mr. 
Norton a little later he says : — 

" It is always my happiest thought that with 
all my drawbacks of temperament (of which no 
one is more keenly conscious than myself) I have 
never lost a friend. For I would rather be loved 
than anything else in the world. I always thirst 
after affection, and depend more on the expres- 
sion of it than is altogether wise." 

In the period of his first poetic flowering time, 
which was also that of his first domestic happi- 
ness at Elmwood, as well as in the later years of 
his English mission and after, there were con- 
straints and preoccupations which sometimes 
hindered Lowell from giving of himself quite 
freely to old friends, or coming into that precipi- 
tate intimacy with new ones toward which one 
side of his nature inclined. In these periods, 
the first and last, the friendship of women meant 
more to him than that of any men, save two or 
three. In the middle time, of which we are now 
writing, from 1857 to 1877, Lowell was perhaps 
most himself, — less subject to the perturba- 
tions of the poetic temperament than he had 
been in earlier years, and a little less upon his 
dignity than he was after his diplomatic career. 



172 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

He was, as the frontispiece of this book shows 
abundantly, an easy, sincere, altogether human 
man, wise, as all the records prove, in that deep 
practice of friendship which seems sadly in the 
way of becoming one of the lost arts. 

In the summer of 1870 Lowell received a visit 
from Thomas Hughes, who had acted as the 
English sponsor of the " Biglow Papers," and it 
is significant to note that this most hearty and 
human of the English Victorian writers was, with 
the exception of Leslie Stephen, the one to draw 
out from Lowell in his letters the warmest ex- 
pressions of affection. 

Lowell's pursuits in the three years from 1869 
to 1872 were mingled as usual of writing and 
lecturing, with, for a time, a new infusion of busi- 
ness cares. He was indeed at this time a little 
harassed in money matters. In order to have 
some measure of freedom from the pressure of 
academic routine, he had arranged with the 
authorities at Harvard to grant him a tutor, on 
the consideration of his resigning a generous 
portion of his salary. As his income from the 
" North American Review " and his books was 
not large, and as the thirty heavily taxed acres 
of his Elmwood estate, on which he had done 
only a little gentleman farming, made him land 
poor, he found his situation for a time rather 
difficult. He endeavored at first to eke out an 



PUBLIC MAN AND CRITIC 173 

adequate income by lecturing, and went to Balti- 
more for that purpose, and also to the newly- 
founded Cornell University. Eventually, how- 
ever, he saw that it would be the part of busi- 
ness wisdom to sell the greater portion of his 
land. After a good deal of work and worry, to 
which he frequently refers in his published and 
unpublished letters, he finally arranged in 1871 
to sell some twenty-five acres for a price that he 
hoped would give him an established income of 
five thousand dollars a year. Later it shrank to 
about four thousand. This latter amount, how- 
ever, was sufficient to give him greater ease 
of mind and a new freedom. He proposed to 
the Harvard authorities to take his sabbatical 
year abroad ; and as he had been teaching with- 
out interruption for sixteen years he hoped that 
they might consent to grant him two years' ab- 
sence on half pay. This, however, the authori- 
ties refused to consider ; and so Lowell tendered 
his formal resignation in the spring of 1872. It 
was provisionally accepted, and on the 9th of 
July, after having seen his daughter Mabel 
married three months before to Mr. Edward 
Burnett of South borough, and having finished 
his essay on Dante, which appeared in the July 
number of the " North American Eeview," he 
sailed in company with Mrs. Lowell for his 
third visit to Europe. 



174 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

To the student of Lowell's literary career, the 
two years he spent in Europe from 1872 to 1874 
are, like his previous visits, not very significant. 
But to one who could fully understand the fluc- 
tuation of his mood as a man, they are of con- 
siderable moment. With the exception of his 
Agassiz memorial poem, Lowell wrote nothing 
during his stay abroad, and this vacancy from 
literary pursuits, as well as his freedom from 
academic work after so many years of constant 
labor, seems to have had a not altogether happy 
reaction upon his frame of mind. The prevail- 
ing tone of his letters during these years was, as 
always, cheerful ; but reading between the lines 
we can see that his mood partook more and 
more of a sombre melancholy. This was doubt- 
less due in part to causes in his physical life, as 
well as to the reaction from his busy and vari- 
ous routine. Up to this time his health had been 
extraordinarily robust. As he frequently boasted, 
he never took a pill until he was fifty ; and there 
is a tradition that he never wore an overcoat in 
the coldest Cambridge weather ; though this is 
questionable, for there is another tradition that 
he habitually wore a pea-jacket. At any rate, 
save for occasional migraine, which doubtless 
came from the excessive use of his eyes, he 
never had any grave or chronic ailment. During 
his stay abroad, however, he developed more 



PUBLIC MAN AND CRITIC 175 

marked symptoms of a disease which, hitherto 
regarded as a sort of joke, was to harass him 
intermittently until his death. Writing to his 
nephew-in-law, Mr. George Putnam, from Paris 
in 1874, he says : — 

*' The doctor in Rome, however, gave my trou- 
bles a name, — and that by robbing them of 
mystery has made them commonplace. He said 
it was suppressed gout. It has a fancy of grip- 
ping me in the stomach sometimes, holding on 
like a slow fire for seven hours at a time. It is 
wonderful how one gets used to things, however. 
But it seems to be growing lighter, and I hope 
to come home robust and red." 

There was, notwithstanding, much in his Eu- 
ropean visit to cause Lowell happiness. The 
first months were spent in England, where he 
renewed many old friendships very happily. 
Thence in the autumn the Lowells went to Paris, 
where they established themselves in a quaint 
Parisian hotel, the Hotel de Lorraine, at No. 7 
Rue de Beaune, which was ever afterwards to be 
his headquarters in the French capital, and where 
a photograph of him, it is said, still hangs. 
There he was joined in a few weeks by the Nor- 
tons, and a little later by John Holmes, most 
Lambish of humorists, and the Emersons. So 
he spent the winter, cheered by such friendly 
associations, reading steadily at his old French, 



176 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

studying the antiquities of Paris, and buying 
books. In the spring of 1873 he crossed to Eng- 
land, where he received the honorary degree of 
D. C. L. at Oxford. This was a deep pleasure to 
him, though he characteristically lamented that 
his father could never have seen this decoration 
in the Harvard Triennial Catalogue. 

After a summer spent in Switzerland and 
Germany, the Lowells went to Italy for the 
winter. They journeyed first to Venice, and then 
to Florence, where the news of the death of 
Agassiz startled them. At this Lowell's poetic 
powers, after their years of brooding disuse, 
were quickened again into intense productive 
activity, so that he wrote his Agassiz memorial 
poem in a rapt mood such as he had not known 
since the composition of the " Commemoration 
Ode." From this sudden flood of feeling the 
Agassiz ode drew a volume of rich tone and deep 
emotion that sometimes even surpasses that of 
the " Commemoration Ode " itself. Lowell's own 
account of the psychologic genesis of this poem 
is too important to be omitted. Writing to 
Mr. Norton from Kome a few weeks later, he 
says : — 

" A very deep chord had been touched also at 
Florence by the sight of our old lodgings in the 
Casa Guidi, of the balcony Mabel used to run 
on, and windows we used to look out at so long 



PUBLIC MAN AND CRITIC 177 

ago. I got sometimes into the mood I used to 
be in when I was always repeating to myself, — 

' King Pandion he is dead; 
All thy friends are lapt in lead,' — 

phrases which seem to me desolately pathetic. 
At last I began to hum over bits of my poem in 
my head till it took complete possession of me 
and worked me up to a delicious state of ex- 
citement, all the more delicious as my brain (or 
at any rate the musical part of it) had been 
lying dormant so long. I could n't sleep, and 
when I walked out I saw nothing outward. My 
old trick of seeing things with my eyes shut after 
I had gone to bed (I mean whimsical things 
utterly alien to the train of my thought, — for 
example, a hospital ward with a long row of 
white untenanted beds, and on the farthest a 
pile of those little wooden dolls with red-painted 
slippers) revived in full force. Nervous, horribly 
nervous, but happy for the first time (I mean 
consciously happy) since I came over here. 
And so by degrees my poem worked itself out. 
The parts came to me as I came awake, and I 
wrote them down in the morning. I had all my 
bricks, but the mortar would n't set^ as the 
masons say. However, I got it into order at 
last."i 

1 Letters, vol. ii, pp. 324, 325. 



178 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

In February, 1874, the Lowells went down to 
Rome, where they stayed for a month with the 
Storys. Thence, after a brief Italian giro^ they 
returned to their cosy Parisian hotel. 

Throughout the spring there had been a ques- 
tion of the possibility of Lowell's returning to his 
chair at Harvard. He had been a little hurt by 
the circumstances of his leaving, and he did not 
feel irresistibly drawn to bind himself again with 
the old academic routine. At last, though with a 
good deal of misgiving, he agreed again to ac- 
cept the post and began to think of going home. 
This seems to have been an increasingly pleasant 
thought ; for, as he had written to Mr. Aldrich 
from Paris the year before : " Cambridge is bet- 
ter, as the rivers of Damascus were better than 
Jordan. There is no place like it, no, not even 
for taxes ! '* 

The Lowells left Paris early In June, 1874. 
They stopped in England, and Lowell went to 
Cambridge to receive the degree of Doctor of 
Laws. There, as he rejoiced in a letter to 
Hughes : " Everybody was as warm as the day 
was cool," and he added, " When I go home I 
shall try to be half as good as the orator said I 
was." They sailed homeward from Liverpool on 
the 23d of June, 1874, and reached Elmwood on 
the 4th of July. 



PUBLIC MAN AND CRITIC 179 

Despite his misgivings, Lowell seems to have 
taken up his university work with a good deal of 
pleasure, and his letters are full of his delight at 
heing home again among the familiar books and 
birds of Elmwood. Of the Elmwood landscape 
he wrote to Mrs. S. B. Herrick, of Baltimore, a 
new correspondent with whom he had developed 
a swift friendship : — 

" It is what my eye first looked on, and I trust 
will look on last. A group of tall pines, planted 
by my father, and my lifelong friends, murmurs 
to me as I write with messages out of the past 
and mysterious premonitions of the future. My 
wife's flowers recall her sweetly to me in her ab- 
sence from home, and the leaves of her morning- 
glories that shelter the verandah where I sit 
whisper of her. A horse-chestnut, of which I 
planted the seed more than fifty years ago, lifts 
its huge stack of shade before me and loves me 
with all its leaves.^ I should be as happy as a 
humming-bird were I not printing another vol- 
ume of essays." 

But the matter of the chiefest significance in 
LowelFs life in the years between 1874 and 1877 
is that of his reemergence in American politics. 
During his sojourn in Europe he had been con- 
tinually harassed by the necessity of explaining 

^ This recalls queerly that offending sentence of Thoreau's 
which Lowell struck out of " Chesuncook." See p. 140. 



180 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

and apologizing for the flagrant civil and polit- 
ical crimes which had cropped out during the 
second administration of Grant. In his " Agas- 
siz " the two lines which now read, — 

" The Land of Honest Abraham serves of late 
To teach the Old World how to wait," 

read in the original manuscript, 

" The Land of Broken Promise," etc. 
At the earnest solicitation of his friends, Lowell 
softened the stinging phrase ; but the bitterness 
of his disappointment persisted. After his re- 
turn from Europe he printed in " The Nation " 
a series of biting epigrams, in which the evil of 
the public condonation of such crimes as those 
of Tweed and Fisk is caustically touched. This 
stirred a storm of newspaper reproach, and 
there was much vulgar complaining that Lowell 
had foregathered to his harm with lords and 
dukes, had lost his old Americanism, and become 
an apostate from Republican principles. His let- 
ters at this time were full of his sorrow for such 
an attack, but his true apologia was in the first 
part of that epistle to Curtis written in 1874, 
which was finished and published with a post- 
script in 1887. In it he writes : — 

" I love too well the pleasures of retreat 
Safe from the crowd and cloistered from the street ; 
The fire that whispers its domestic joy, 
Flickering on walls that knew me still a boy," — 



PUBLIC MAN AND CRITIC 181 

so lie runs on in a vivid picture of the charm of 
his familiar life at Elmwood, and then turns to 
the damning catalogue of those noisome public 
evils which have forced him to break his scholarly 
quiet to utter wholesome, unpopular truth : — 

" Office a fund for ballot-brokers made, 
To pay the drudges of their gainful trade ; 
Our cities taught what conquered cities feel 
By sediles chosen that they might safely steal ; 
And gold, however got, a title fair 
To such respect as only gold can bear. 
I seem to see this ; how shall I gainsay 
What all our journals tell me every day ? 
Poured our young martyrs their high-hearted blood 
That we might trample to congenial mud 
The soil with such a legacy sublimed ? 
Methinks an angry scorn is here well-timed : 
Where find retreat ? How keep reproach at bay ? 
Where'er I turn some scandal fouls the way." 

But Lowell's political poetry, even at this 
time, never lost its constructive poetical idealism 
in mere diatribe. The three fine odes — that 
read at the Concord Centennial, that read Under 
the Old Elm on the Hundredth Anniversary of 
Washington's Taking Command of the American 
Army, and the "Ode for the Fourth of July, 
1876 " — breathe still, for all their passages of 
discouragement, the old winged aspiration of 

those who know 

" Life's bases rest 
Beyond the probe of chemic test." 



182 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

Lowell also began at this time to bear a more 
active part in practical politics. As the hotly 
contested election of 1876 approached, the more 
independent wing of the Republican party in 
Cambridge organized for the purpose of defeat- 
ing the nomination of Blaine, who was then at 
the height both of his political popularity and of 
his notoriety on account of his dubious connec- 
tion with the franchise and the securities of the 
Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad. Lowell 
was urged to take an active part in this campaign, 
and he consented. A draft of a speech made by 
him at a preliminary caucus has been preserved.^ 
It begins with an academic neatness which has a 
singular sound in this sort of composition : — 

"I do not propose," he says, "to make a 
speech. Still less shall I try to captivate your 
ears or win your applauses by any of those ap- 
peals to passion and prejudice which are so 
tempting and so unwise. Politics are the most 
serious of all human affairs, and I prefer the 
approval of your understandings to that of your 
hands and feet." So he proceeds to an able plea 
for an honest independence in politics, and in 
particular for civil service reform. 

His appeal to the understanding was success- 
ful. Lowell himself was chosen a delegate to the 
Republican Convention in Cincinnati, and on the 
1 Scudder.vol. ii, pp. 20G-211. 



PUBLIC MAN AND CRITIC 183 

seventh ballot Hayes, not Blaine, received the 
Republican nomination. Lowell was also named 
as one of the presidential electors, and, as has 
been often recounted, he received a high compli- 
ment to his political probity and independence 
when, during the dead-lock which followed the 
election, he was asked to break it by casting his 
electoral vote. Republican as he was, for Tilden, 
There was never in this the slightest suspicion of 
Lowell's being open to a quid pro quo. It was 
argued that as the election had been stolen from 
Tilden by fraudulent returns it was the plain duty 
of an honest Republican elector to restore it to 
him. Lowel] thought rightly, however, that this 
would have been bad faith to the voters by whom 
he had been elected ; he declined to do so, and 
the election of Hayes stood, fortunately for tlie 
country, to which his services loom larger with 
every passing year. 



CHAPTER V 

DIPLOMATIST 

1877-1885 

1. Spain. 

With the natural inclination of a man of letters 
conscious of general powers of a high order, 
Lowell had been thinking half-whimsically all 
his life of a public career ; and in his familiar 
letters he had joked about the chances of his 
election to Congress, or of being sent to repre- 
sent his country at the Court of St. James. Yet 
in 1869 he seems to have been a good deal sur- 
prised when he received an intimation that owing 
to the friendly propaganda of Judge Hoar he 
had come very near being sent as Minister to 
Spain. In 1876, at the time of the political sally 
recounted in the last chapter, he was actually 
urged to stand for Congress. After the election 
of Hayes was finally established, the talk of 
sending Lowell abroad was revived. In the 
usual course of such matters, he was " men- 
tioned " for London, for St. Petersburg, for Ber- 
lin, and for Vienna ; but finally in the sj^ring of 



DIPLOMATIST 185 

1877 he was offered the mission to Madrid. The 
classical account of the circumstances of this ar- 
rangement is that by Mr. Ho wells. It has been 
often quoted, but it is too significant of Lowell's 
attitude toward his role of diplomatist and too 
charming in itself to be omitted. Mr. Howells, 
having some family connection with President 
Hayes, had written to him that he believed 
Lowell would accept a diplomatic post. The 
President replied that he should be gratified if 
Mr. Howells would find out if Lowell would ac- 
cept the mission to Austria. 

" I lost no time," writes Mr. Howells, " in 
carrying his letter over to Elmwood, where I 
found Lowell over his coiBPee at dinner. He saw 
me at the threshold, and called to me through 
the open door to come in, and I handed him the 
letter, and sat down at the table while he ran it 
through. When he had read it, he gave a quick 
' Ah ! ' and threw it the length of the table to 
Mrs. Lowell. She read it in a smiling and loyal 
reticence, as if she would not say one word of all 
she might wish in urging his acceptance, though 
I could see that she was intensely eager for it. 
The whole situation was of a perfect New Eng- 
land character in its tacit significance ; after 
Lowell had taken his coffee we turned into his 
study without further allusion to the matter." ^ 
1 Literary Friends and Acquaintance^ p. 238. 



186 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

A day or two later Lowell went to Mr. Howells's 
house and told him that he could not accept 
the Austrian mission, and begged him to make 
proper acknowledgments to the President ; but 
upon rising to leave he said with a half- whimsical 
sigh, "I should like to see a play of Calderon." 
This intimation was transmitted by Mr. Howells 
to Washington along with Lowell's declination 
of the Austrian mission, and in due time he was 
appointed to Madrid. 

Lowell's characteristic frame of mind toward 
his new office is seen engagingly in his letters. 
Writing on June 5, 1877, to his daughter, Mrs. 
Burnett, a correspondence in which there could 
have been no suspicion of pose, he said, — " It 
will be of some use to me in my studies, and I 
shall not stay there long at any rate. But it is 
hard to leave Elmwood while it is looking so 
lovely. The canker worms have burned up all 
my elms and apple trees . . ." — and thereafter 
the talk is all of trees and birds, with no further 
reference to his new honors. Or take him in a 
little more whimsical vein to a little less intimate 
correspondent. On July 1, 1877, he wrote to 
Miss Grace Norton : — 

*' I dare say I shall enjoy it after I get there, 
but at present it is altogether a bore to be hon- 
orabled at every turn. The world is a droll affair. 
And yet, between ourselves, dear Grace, I should 



DIPLOMATIST 187 

be pleased if my father could see me in capitals 
on the Triennial Catalogue." 

Yet Lowell approached his new responsibility 
in a more sober spirit than would appear from 
this surface play of his habitual whimsicality. 
He knew his fitness for the post through his 
long and intimate knowledge of Spanish litera- 
ture, which had given him some measure of com- 
prehension of the difficult national mood of Spain, 
and of the none too accessible Spanish character. 
He must also have felt a sense of competence to 
deal with international issues, both because of his 
legal training and his familiarity with the his- 
tory and politics of Europe, and because of that 
larger grasp of political relations which he had 
convincingly shown in his writings at two great 
national crises. 

Just after his appointment, he was stunned 
by the death of two of his dearest friends, Miss 
Jane Norton and Edmund Quincy. So it was in 
a somewhat sad and sober mood that he sailed 
from Boston on the 14th of July, 1877. Because 
of his ministerial dignity he was escorted down 
the harbor, much to his annoyance, by a revenue 
cutter and a special tug. 

While in Spain Lowell wrote nothing save 
dispatches, letters, and a sonnet or two, so that 
it is possible to forget his writing for a time, and 



188 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

deal wholly with his work as a diplomatist. We 
must not forget, however, that in the dignified 
countenance of the American Minister, the shrewd 
eye of Hosea Biglow still twinkled, and that the 
hand which turned to writing dispatches about in- 
demnities, or extraditions, was the same that had 
penned " The Vision of Sir Launfal " and the 
" Commemoration Ode." 

Lowell arrived in Madrid on the 14th of Au- 
gust, 1877, and was presented four days later to 
the boy king, who was then at his summer palace 
at La Granja. His welcome was all that he could 
have wished. Mr. Adee, who was the charge d'af- 
faires^ pending Lowell's arrival, says : " In the 
Spanish eye he came not to continue the dispu- 
tatious and aggressive policy of Sickles and Gush- 
ing, but to revive the amiable traditions of Wash- 
ington Irving's day." His reception, therefore, 
was planned for him in his character of man of 
letters. He was genially hailed by the Spanish 
press as " Jose Bighlow," and lines of his poetry 
were flatteringly quoted to him by the King and 
by the Minister for Foreign Affairs. For the lat- 
ter, Manuel Sil vela, Lowell formed a fast personal 
friendship. Silvela was a man of fine belletristic 
taste and considerable erudition. He found Low- 
ell's tobacco excellent, and the two seem to have 
been more ready to chat about the Cid, Cervantes, 
or Calderon, than to discuss knotty questions of 



DIPLOMATIST 189 

international commerce. Moreover, the King, to 
whom Lowell was accredited, was an eager, gay- 
hearted boy, and there are reasons to believe that 
Lowell's own invincible boyishness was sometimes 
imperfectly veiled by his diplomatic gravity, and 
that there was a feeling of personal sympathy 
between the young King and himself that was 
rather unusual. It is certain, at any rate, that 
when Lowell, as Minister, extended his country's 
condolences on the death of Queen Mercedes, and, 
later, his felicitations on the King's escape from 
assassination, there was some personal human 
talk between them that was not at all the cus- 
tomary diplomatic interchange of conventional 
sentiment assiduously prepared in advance. 

Yet for all these pleasant circumstances and 
associations, Lowell's position at first was far 
from easy. His acute stomach attacks persist- 
ently recurred, and he worried continually over 
the punctilio of his diplomatic duties. As he 
wrote to Thomas Hughes : — 

" I had a hard row to hoe at first. All alone, 
without a human being I had ever seen before 
in my life, and with unaccustomed duties, feel- 
ing as if I were beset with snares on every hand, 
obliged to carry on the greater part of my busi- 
ness in a strange tongue — it was rather trying 
for a man with so sympathetic and sensitive a 
temperament as mine, and I don't much wonder 



190 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

the gout came upon me like an armed man. 
Three attacks in five months ! But now I begin 
to take things more easily." 

In the summer of 1878 Lowell made a brief 
excursion to Italy, to Greece, where for the first 
time he saw Athens, and to Turkey. He had 
been but a week in Athens when, the oppor- 
tunity occurring for a visit to Constantinople, 
he very characteristically accepted it; for, as 
he wrote to Mr. Norton : " I have a theory 
that peaches have only one good bite in 'em, 
and that a second spoils that. I am glad we 
went. . . . Our four days at Constantinople 
were nothing more nor less than so many Ara- 
bian Nights." 

He returned to Madrid greatly improved in 
health and spirits. " I have come back," he 
wrote, " a new man, and have flung my blue 
spectacles into the paler Mediterranean. I really 
begin to find life at last tolerable here, nay, to 
enjoy it after a fashion." The course of his 
Spanish day as it was at this time is outlined in 
one of his letters : — 

" This is the course of my day : — Up at 8, 
from 9 sometimes till 11 my Spanish professor, 
at 11 breakfast, at 12 to the legation, at 3 home 
again and a cup of chocolate, then read the 
paper and write Spanish till a quarter to 7, at 
7 dinner, and at 8 drive in an open carriage in 



DIPLOMATIST 191 

the Prado till 10, to bed at 12 to 1. In cooler 
weather we drive in the afternoon. I am very- 
well — cheerful and no gout." 

He was greatly pleased about this time at 
being made a member of the Spanish Academy, 
where, as he boasted with glee, he could discuss 
the new edition of the official Spanish diction- 
ary. As time went on, the romantic, half-oriental 
appeal of the country around Madrid, with its 
variegated life, its crowding suggestions of the 
old peninsular literature that he loved best, gave 
him much happiness. But lest he should grow 
too easy and happy in his post, fate had sharper 
troubles than the gout and diplomatic business 
in store for him. In the winter of 1879 and 
1880 Mrs. Lowell fell desperately ill. Her life 
was many times despaired of, and even when 
she became at last convalescent, she was left 
with a disturbance of the brain that, situated as 
they were in a strange country, preyed savagely 
upon Lowell's spirits. It is at this time that 
musings upon the possibility of faith in an age 
of science began to give more sombre color to 
some of his letters. 

On January 22, 1880, Lowell received a cipher 
dispatch. His first thought was, as he writes to 
Mrs. Burnett, " Row in Cuba, I shall have no 
end of bother." It turned out to be this: "Pre- 
sident has nominated you to England. He re- 



192 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

gards it as essential to the public service that 
you should accept and make your personal 
arrangements to repair to London as early as 
may be. Your friends whom I have conferred 
with concur in this view." Although a little 
startled at the suddenness of the promotion, it 
was from the first very attractive to Lowell. 
He already had many friends in England, the 
climate had always agreed with him, and he 
was particularly anxious to move Mrs. Lowell 
into a more homelike environment. He ar- 
ranged to accept, provided two months' delay 
might be granted him in which to prepare for 
the change. 

Despite the worries and embarrassments of 
Lowell's stay in Spain, which led him to reiter- 
ate in his letters with quaint sadness, " Tu I'as 
voulu, Georges Dandin, tu I'as voulu," he had 
made a marked success of his diplomatic work, 
and served an excellent apprenticeship for that 
highest post in his country's diplomatic service 
to which he was now called. Nowhere else than 
in Spain could he have been so promptly and 
effectually initiated into the ceremonial of diplo- 
matic life. At first he was a little amused and 
a good deal bored by the formalities and the 
exchange of " infantile " remarks which made 
up diplomatic conversation. But as time went 
on he seems to have found more pleasure in the 



DIPLOMATIST 193 

game, and to have played his part in it with 
both dignity and discretion. 

In the active business of the ministerial office 
he acquitted himself equally well. His situation 
in Spain was of a considerable delicacy. The 
Spanish monarchy had only just been reestab- 
lished after an interregnum of violence ; and the 
filibustering disturbances in Cuba, in which many 
Americans had been shot without trial, had taken 
place only three years before, and the ensuing 
strain in the relations of Spain and America had 
not yet worn away. There can be no doubt that 
Lowell did much to establish a more cordial 
entente between the two countries. 

Lowell's official dispatches from Spain, some 
of the more interesting of which were collected 
by Mr. Joseph B. Gilder and published with an 
introduction by Mr. Adee in 1899, have the par- 
ticular distinction of bearing the mark of the 
Minister's own style, rather than that of his sec- 
retary or a charge d'affaires. They are not with- 
out a great deal of political sagacity, but they 
are written in his characteristic epistolary vein 
— humorous, pathetic, frank, sometimes book- 
ish, with his habitual whimsicality only a little 
chastened by any sense of occasion. One won- 
ders a little what the Machiavellis of the State 
Department at Washington in the presidency of 
Hayes made of a minister who notes with em- 



194 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

phasis that at a great public function which he 
is describing the prettiest women were those 
from Andalusia, and in writing of the sad death 
of the young Queen casually quotes " the famil- 
iar stanza of Malherbe : " — 

" Le pauvre en sa cabane, ou le chaume le couvre, 
Est sujet k ses lois, 
Et la garde qui veille aux barrieres du Louvre 
N'en defend point nos rois." 

However as one of the assistant secretaries at 
that time was John Hay, there was at least one 
reader to perceive the aptness of the quotation. 
Yet, for all their discursiveness, Lowell's dis- 
patches must have served their purpose admir- 
ably. Some of his political prophecies for the 
future of Spain have not yet come true ; but 
his shrewd chara,cterization of the chief figures 
in Spanish political life, and his happy guesses 
at their motives, could not have failed to be of 
the first service to his departmental chiefs at 
home. 

Nevertheless there were many who held that 
Lowell was in a sense " wasted " at Madrid, and 
had from the start advocated his transfer to Eng- 
land. The event proved the truth of this convic- 
tion ; for after growing his diplomatic shell in 
Spain, he passed to England to perform perhaps 
as subtle and far-reaching public service as the 
history of American diplomacy has to record. 



DIPLOMATIST 195 

2. England, 

** * What if I send him,' Uncle S., says he, 
* To my good cousin whom he calls J. B. ? * 
A nation's servants go where they are sent; 
He heard his Uncle's order and he went. 
By what enchantments, what alluring arts. 
Our truthful James led captive British hearts, — 
Whether his shrewdness made their statesmen halt. 
Or if his learning found their Dons at fault, 
Or if his virtue was a strange surprise. 
Or if his wit flung star-dust in their eyes; — 
Like honest Yankees we can simply guess." 

So wrote Holmes of Lowell on his return from 
England ; and it would be hard to find a more 
compact statement of the personal triumph which 
our author won at the Court of Saint James. He 
had been preceded there by many eminent men, 
and by one or two of the first distinction in 
letters ; but none of them performed more not- 
able services than Lowell. He was not, of course, 
called upon to confront such grave diplomatic 
crises as those which Mr. Adams a few years 
before had dealt with so wisely ; but he did have 
to encounter the great intangible body of pre- 
judice against this country which had been 
aroused by the public scandals of the Recon- 
struction Period ; — and, standing as the repre- 
sentative of his country, he succeeded admirably 
well in living and laughing this prejudice down. 



196 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

No minister ever began his career under more 
satisfactory and friendly auspices than Lowell. 
As he writes casually soon after his arrival in 
London in the spring of 1880 : " I am over- 
whelmed already with invitations, though I have 
not put my arrival in the papers." For all the 
pain that he had felt over the attitude of Eng- 
land toward America in war-time, and his very 
frank expression of it, it was the pain of a dis- 
appointed admirer rather than of an habitual 
foe. So he soon found himself very happily at 
home in London. As he wrote to Mr. Norton 
three years later : — 

" I like London, and have learned to see as 
I never saw before the advantages of a great 
capital. It establishes one set of weights and 
measures, moral and intellectual, for the whole 
country. It is, I think, a great drawback for us 
that we have as many as we have states. The 
flow of life in the streets, too — sublimer it seems 
to me often than the tides of the sea — gives me 
a kind of stimulus that I find agreeable even if 
it prompt to nothing. For I am growing old, 
dear Charles, and have n't the go in me I once 
had. Then I have only to walk a hundred yards 
from my door to be in Hyde Park where, and in 
Kensington Gardens, I can tread on green turf 
and hear thrushes sing all winter. I often think 
of what you said to me about the birds here. 



DIPLOMATIST 197 

There are a great many more, and they sing 
more perennially than ours. As for the climate, 
it suits me better than any I have ever lived in, 
and for the inward weather, I have never seen 
civilization at so high a level in some respects as 
here." ^ 

The remark at the close of the passage above 
about the " inward weather " of London hints at 
that prodigious social success of Lowell in Lon- 
don which it is now a little hard to appreciate. 
As we reconstruct it from the scattered records, 
it becomes a singularly illuminative and signifi- 
cant phenomenon. Mrs. Lowell's ill health made 
it impossible for the Lowells to entertain in their 
ministerial capacity ; so that Lowell was free to 
accept without the burden of return all the mul- 
titudinous invitations that came to him. He 
Wint everywhere in London — in literary, in 
official, and in fashionable society. And as Mr. 
Smalley has said, probably no American ever 
saw the inside of so many English country- 
louses as Lowell. 

At first he seems to have been a little shy and 
stiff in " society." Mr. Watts-Dunton, who went 
one time early in Lowell's London life to invite 
him to lunch to meet an eminent man of letters, 
noting a certain hesitation, said : " I am afraid 
that the American Minister who has jostled most 

1 Letters, vol. iii, p. 105. 



198 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

of the grandees in Europe feels shy." **I do^ 
replied Lowell, " but never with grandees." 

Something of this shyness doubtless came 
from his feeling that his Americanism was a lit- 
tle on the defensive. He had written in 1879: 
" We are vulgar now precisely because we are 
afraid of being so. The English press is provin- 
cializing us again." And during his first months 
in England Lowell's resolution that he would 
not be provincialized seems at times to have 
made him a little awkward, but as time went on 
this passed into a kind of sweet ironic pleasantry. 
Mr. Smalley has preserved some curious illus- 
trative anecdotes. " Hawthorne insulted us all," 
observed an English woman, " by saying all Eng- 
lish women were fat ; but I dare not say in Mr. 
Lowell's presence that an American woman is 
thin," — and in an address to the master and fel- 
lows of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, he said 
rather saucily, " I must allow that, considering 
how long we have been divided from you, you 
speak English remarkably well." 

Mr. Henry James, writing from the insular 
point of view, discovered a certain ostentation 
in Lowell's exhibition of national consciousness 
as if he spoke for a nation oppressed and in ser- 
vitude ; but, after the slight constraint of his 
first months was past, this was certainly no more 
than his instinctive wish to justify the America 



DIPLOMATIST 199 

that he loved in the sight of England, for whose 
mellow mood he had, even in his most anti-insu- 
lar seasons, a profound and vital respect. 

However that may be, it is certain that even 
in Lowell's occasional mocking at things Eng- 
lish, English men and women found a charming 
piquancy ; and few that met him failed to yield 
wholly to his gracious wisdom and airy wit. In- 
deed, he seems to have attracted Englishmen all 
the more powerfully in that with all the culture 
of their best he possessed a certain readiness and 
resiliency of mind which they themselves some- 
times lacked. 

For a poet his satisfactions were of the solid- 
est. Once at a house party he came upon John 
Bright reading aloud from the " Commemora- 
tion Ode " to a group of intent listeners. " It 
sounded better than I feared," Lowell noted. 
And Trevelyan told him that he could never 
have carried through the abolition of purchase 
in the British army but for the inspiration 
and reinforcement he had drawn from the same 
poem. 

The public honors which were thrust upon 
Lowell were as numerous and notable as his 
private successes. The list of honorary public 
offices which he held in English institutions is a 
long one. He was even asked to accept the Lord 
Rectorship of the University of St. Andrews — a 



200 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

proposal which was received with great enthu- 
siasm by the students and faculty of that in- 
stitution. There was, however, some concerted 
opposition to this on the ground that Lowell was 
an alien, and an animated public controversy 
ensued, not the least striking result of which 
were the verses which appeared in "Punch," 
beginning', 

** An alien ? Go to ! if fresh genial wit 
In sound Saxon speech be not genuine grit, 
If the wisdom and mirth he has put in verse for us 
Don't make him a * native,' why so much the worse for 
us." 

In the end Lowell wisely withdrew his name, 
though with a whimsical regret that the cabalistic 
symbols, Univ. Sanct. Andr. Scot. Dom. Rect., 
could never appear after his name in the Har- 
vard Quinquennial Catalogue. He wrote about 
it to Professor Child : — 

" I have no news except that my official ex- 
traterritoriality will, perhaps, prevent my being 
rector of St. Andrews, because it puts me be- 
yond the reach of the Scottish Courts in case of 
malversation in office. How to rob a Scottish 
University suggests a serious problem. I was 
pleased with the election and the pleasant way 
it was spoken of here, though I did not want the 
place. Had I known what I know now, I should 
not have allowed myself to be put up, but I was 



DIPLOMATIST 201 

in Paris, and had forgotten among the bookstalls 
that I was an Excellency." ^ 

Lowell always took his English honors and 
successes, both public and private, with a certain 
humorous pleased humility. In 1884 he wrote 
to Mrs. W. K. Clifford, one of the closest of his 
English friends : — 

*' Could I have been such an ass as to ask if I 
was charming? It is out of the question. Even 
if I thought I was, I should be too clever to in- 
quire too nicely about it, for I hold with my 
favorite Donne that 'who knows his virtue's 
name and place hath none.' And yet I have in- 
ferred from your letter that I have been stupid 
enough to ask something of the kind. Nothing 
in my life has ever puzzled me so much as my 
popularity here in England — which I have done 
nothing and been nothing to deserve. I was 
telling my wife a day or two ago that I could n't 
understand it. It must be my luck, and ought 
to terrify me, like the ring of Polycrates." ^ 

If the course of Lowell's official career in 
England was not quite so extraordinary as his 
locial, it was none the less marked by admirable 
diplomacy. When he had been there a little 
more than a year, President Garfield was shot 

^ Letters, vol. iii, pp. 110, 111. 
2 Letters, vol. iii, p. 118. 



202 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

by Guiteau ; and in the anxious period that 
intervened before Garfield's death, Lowell per- 
formed the delicate office of mediating the sym- 
pathy and sorrow of two great countries with 
very perfect tact. After the President's death, 
Lowell, finding himself quite worn out witb the 
anxieties of the past weeks, took a brief vacation 
trip on the Continent, visiting Paris, Dresden, 
Weimar, Venice, and Rome. 

Before setting out on his vacation, Lowell had 
sent to Mr. Gilder, editor of the '* Century," his 
charming poem, " Phoebe," the first which he 
had written since the sonnet composed on the 
death of the young Spanish queen. In the week 
after mailing it, he followed it with five sepa- 
rate letters of rather fidgety emendation, showing 
curiously the growth in him of a delicate artis- 
tic sense, along with some decrease in his old 
confidence in his vein. It seems clear, how- 
ever, that the geniality of his London life had 
quickened his poetic impulse again ; and he 
might have gone on after his return from the 
Continent to write more frequent verse had it 
not been for the sudden recrudescence of the 
trouble over certain Irish-American citizens 
which had begun some months before. This 
caused Lowell endless work and worry, so that 
during the English stay he wrote no other verse 
than some graceful personal poems. 



DIPLOMATIST 203 

The Irish troubles were the most intricate and 
annoying that Lowell as a diplomatist had to 
face. It will be remembered that certain Irish 
Nationalists, after having attained American 
citizenship during a brief stay in the United 
States, returned to Ireland, became involved in 
the Nationalist agitation then rife, and were put 
in jail by the English authorities. There was 
at once a strong concerted action among Irish- 
Americans in the United States to secure their 
release, and a great deal of furious speech-mak- 
ing in Congress and elsewhere. Lowell seems 
to have conducted the matter with Lord Gran- 
ville very astutely and firmly, though too dis- 
creetly to find much favor with agitated Irishmen 
in the United States. The difficulty of his situa- 
tion is amply set forth in a letter to Holmes 
written after the worst of the trouble was over : — 

" I made no distinction between naturalized 
and native and should have treated you as I did 
the ' suspects ' — had there been as good ground. 
There is a manifest distinction, however, between 
a native American who goes abroad and a natu- 
ralized citizen who goes back to the country of 
his birth, and we acknowledge it in our treaties 
— notably with Germany — making two years' 
residence in the native country a forfeiture of 
the acquired citizenship. Some of my Irishmen 
had been in their old homes seventeen years, en- 



204 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

gaged in trade or editing Nationalist papers or 
members of the Poor-law Guardians (like Mac- 
Sweeney) and neither paying taxes in America 
nor doing any other duty as Americans. I was 
guided by two things — the recognized princi- 
ples of international law, and the conduct of 
Lord Lyons when Seward was arresting and im- 
prisoning British subjects. We kept one man 
in jail seven months without trial or legal pro- 
cess of any kind, and, but for the considerate- 
ness and moderation of Lyons, might have had 
war with England. I think I saved a misunder- 
standing here. . . . When I had at last procured 
the conditional (really unconditional) release of 
all the suspects, they refused to be liberated. 
When I spoke of this to Justin McCarthy (then 
the head of the Irish Parliamentary party, Par- 
nell being in Kilmainham), he answered cheer- 
fully, * Certainly : they are there to make trou- 

The negotiations were watched with the deep- 
est interest on both sides of the water. At first 
much dissatisfaction was caused in America by 
Lowell's moderate and cautious action, and the 
papers were full of allusions to "that distin- 
guished Englishman, J. R. Lowell." Lowell felt 
this keenly, as may be seen from a sentence in 
a letter to Mr. Aldrich written in May, 1882 : 
1 Letters, vol. iii, pp. 128, 129. 



DIPLOMATIST 205 

" No, you must wait till I come home to be boy- 
cotted in my birthplace by my Irish fellow-citi- 
zens (who are kind enough to teach me how to 
be an American) who fought all our battles and 
got up all our draft riots." However, the papers 
of the better class were with him both in Amer- 
ica and in England. After Lowell's death there 
was a notable memorial article in " The Specta- 
tor," in which the writer, who seems to have 
been privy to some of the conferences, affirmed 
that while Lowell possessed equally with Lord 
Granville the suaviter in Tnodo^ he was even 
more capable of conveying the impression of 
fortitefp in re. A less spectacular but no less 
important affair of Lowell's diplomacy in Eng- 
land was the settlement of many claims involving 
millions of dollars and international considera- 
tions of the most far-reaching kind. Through 
their mutual appreciation and common good 
sense, which brought about a sincere friendship 
between Lowell and Lord Granville, matters 
which might have given trouble were easily and 
amicably settled. 

It is worth remarking that despite his annoy- 
ance over some phases of the protracted Irish 
difficulty, Lowell was never without sympathy 
for the Nationalist movement, and he was a be- 
liever in home rule, which, as he said, " will make 
Conservatives every mother's son of them." 



206 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

Bat more tangible than the diplomatic effec- 
tiveness of Lowell's personal popularity, and 
richer than his actual official activity, was that 
great career as a speech-maker which was, as we 
look back to it, the most striking phenomenon of 
his English mission. 

He had, as we have seen, always enjoyed the 
act of public speaking, provided the circum- 
stances were not those of a set oration before too 
vast an audience ; and at the meetings of the 
Saturday Club, and in his class-room at Harvard, 
he had been undergoing for thirty years the best 
possible preparation for the kind of speeches 
which he was now called upon to make. For 
four years he was universally recognized as the 
most brilliant after-dinner orator in England; 
and he was the most sought after to deliver ad- 
dresses at the unveiling of memorial tablets, and 
on other similar occasions. 

In reading those of his speeches which were 
afterwards revised and incorporated in his col- 
lected works, and still more in reading the news- 
paper reports of his off-hand addresses, it is not 
hard to understand their remarkable prestige. 
In the first years of his stay in England, Lowell's 
speaking was of the first spontaneity and spirit. 
** There was a time," he writes some years later, 
" when I went to make a speech with a light heart, 
and when on my way to a dinner I could think 



DIPLOMATIST 207 

over my exordium in my cab and trust to the 
spur of the moment for the rest of my speech." 
How effective the spur of the moment was may 
be seen from the reports in the English press, 
where the page is peppered with " (^Laughter 
and cheer H)y No public speaker was ever more 
resourceful and adroit in humorous literary allu- 
sion. For example, in a speech at the dinner of 
the Literary Fund on a nipping, blusterous night 
in May, he began by reciting with prayerful 
irony that passage in Thomson's " Seasons," 
beginning, — 

" Come, gentle spring, ethereal mildness, come." 

But the complete success of the speeches was 
due to other qualities than their external bril- 
liancy and happy ease. The more important ones 
were written with the utmost care, and they were 
full of a mellow, ripened literary art and poetic 
idealism which gave an earnest burden to their 
wit. They were, in short, as Mr. Henry James 
has said finely, " the revanche of letters." 

By far the greatest of Lowell's English 
speeches was the address on " Democracy," 
which he delivered as the inaugural on assuming 
the presidency of the Birmingham and Midland 
Institute at Birmingham. He attempted no such 
flights of oratory, no such passionate periods, as 
those that Beecher had flung at his Liverpool 



208 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

audience twenty years before ; but he did pre- 
sent the eternal ideals of democracy with a 
lucidity, a suggestiveness, and a secure convic- 
tion that gave to his utterances the accent of 
finality. None other of his political writings is 
so full of happy flashes of political insight. How 
suggestive, for example, is this passing defini- 
tion : " England, indeed, may be called a mon- 
archy with democratic tendencies, the United 
States a democracy with conservative instincts,'* 
or, as he goes on to say, " People are continually 
saying that America is in the air, and I am glad 
to think it is, since this means only that a clearer 
conception of human claims and human duties is 
beginning to be prevalent." It is hard to say 
what could have been in the minds of Lowell's 
numerous American critics, who persisted in 
accusing him bitterly of Anglomania and an easy 
apostasy from democratic principles in the face 
of such a peroration as this : — 

" Let us be of good cheer, however, remem- 
bering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are 
those which never come. The world has outlived 
much, and will outlive a great deal more, and 
men have contrived to be happy in it. It has 
shown the strength of its constitution in nothing 
more than in surviving the quack medicines it: 
has tried. In the scales of the destinies, brawn 
will never weigh so much as brain. Our healing 



DIPLOMATIST 209 

is not in the storm or in the whirlwind, it is not 
in monarchies, or aristocracies, or democracies, 
but will be revealed by the still, small voice that 
speaks to the conscience and the heart, prompt- 
ing us to a wider and wiser humanity.'* 

After the death of President Garfield and the 
accession of Vice-President Arthur to the presi- 
dential chair, there was the usual talk of a change 
in the diplomatic appointments, and Lowell was 
uncertain for a time whether he was to be kept 
at London. As Mr. Howells had had the plea- 
sure of notifying Lowell of his first appointment 
to a diplomatic mission, so another of his liege- 
men, Mr. R. W. Gilder, had the pleasure of in- 
forming him officially from Mr. Frelinghuysen 
that he was to be retained in his post. But as 
the election of 1884 approached, Lowell could 
not fail to be aware that whichever way it 
might go his chance of remaining in England 
was slight. He had always been a vigorous op- 
ponent of Mr. Blaine and the Blaine faction in 
the Republican party : and despite his inde- 
pendence of party bonds and his personal ad- 
miration for Mr. Cleveland, he could scarcely 
hope to be retained in office by a Democratic 
President. So by the summer of 1884 he had 
begun to think of his return home. 

Any regret that he may have felt at this was 



210 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

forgotten in the overwhelming blow which came 
to him on the 19th of February, 1885, when Mrs. 
Lowell, who had been in uncertain health since 
her desperate attack of typhoid in Madrid five 
years before, died after a brief illness. He wrote 
to Mr. George Putnam two weeks later : " I am 
more than ever at a loss what to do with my- 
self. We had always taken it for granted that 
she would outlive me — that would have been 
best. But I cannot live alone in the old home. 
It would be too dreary ; " — and a fortnight 
later to Mrs. Clifford : *' In trying to piece 
together the broken threads of my life again, 
the brightest naturally catch the eye first. I 
write only to say that I do not forget. I am 
getting on as one does — gradually getting my 
wits together. ... I have at last found some- 
thing I can read — Calderon — he has stood me 
in stead before." And again, a month later, he 
wrote to Mr. Norton, '' My future is misty to 
me." 

As soon as the news of Mr. Phelps's appoint- 
ment as Lowell's successor reached England, a 
strong concerted movement was started to in- 
duce him to remain in that country. He was 
even sounded as to his willingness to accept a 
Professorship of English Language and Litera- 
ture at Oxford, and had he consented to stand 
the post would have been his. But he was tjred, 



DIPLOMATIST 211 

and longed for home. So, in June, 1885, he was 
back in America, established for a time at the 
home of his daughter, Mrs. Burnett, in South- 
borough, Massachusetts, whence he went in the 
summer to Washington, "carrying his head,'* 
as he wrote to Mr. Gilder, " as Bertran de 
Born did, like a lantern," to take a look at his 
decapitators. 

The sum of Lowell's diplomatic service in 
England is perhaps seen best from the English 
point of view. The fullest estimate of it is to 
be gained from the memorial articles which ap- 
peared in the English press after his death in 
1891. His personal success was recorded on 
every hand. " We could not have been prouder 
of him had he been one of us," says one writer ; 
" His mind," says another, " was at once fine and 
sagacious, idealistic and practical, humorous and 
businesslike, witty and sober. . . . With all his 
grace there was a plainness of purpose that could 
not be mistaken." The Queen is recorded to have 
said that during her long reign no ambassador 
or minister had created so much interest and won 
so much regard as Mr. Lowell. And it is im- 
portant to note that his personal popularity 
stretched through all circles of English society. 
Just as he was leaving for America a " numerous 
deputation " of the Workmen's Peace Society 
waited upon him and presented him with some 



212 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

more than commonly warm resolutions engrossed 
on vellum. Mr. Watts-Dunton, writing in tlie 
"Athenaeum," said: "Fine as is the written work 
of Lowell, his unwritten work is finer still ; " and 
he points out the curious fact that not only did 
he establish a new rapport between England and 
America, but also brought into being a relation 
hitherto undreamed of between the literary and 
official sets in England itself. 

Yet, after all, the chief business of an Ameri- 
can minister is not the admirable promotion of 
brotherly love between the writers and the states- 
men of the country to which he is accredited ; nor 
even, as is coming to be thought, to act as the 
business agent of his country's commerce. It is 
rather to stand not only as the spokesman but 
as the type and protagonist of his people, to em- 
body and exhibit without undue violence of em- 
phasis the national virtues and graces, to win 
the way of his people in international affairs by 
the arts of friendship. This Lowell did pre- 
eminently. 



CHAPTER VI 



LAST YEARS 



1886-1891 

From the time of Lowell's return to Amer- 
ica in 1885 and his establishment at Deerfoot 
Farm, Southborough, the shadows of the fifth act 
begin to darken in his letters. There is a good 
deal of the mood of ainsi va le monde^ and re- 
flections upon death are not infrequent. The 
general tone of his correspondence is, neverthe- 
less, indomitably cheerful. After his return to 
America he took up letter-writing as his chief 
occupation, finding, as he humorously complains, 
" a bushel of cold letters " waiting for him after 
each brief absence from home. So his letters of 
this last period, with their sunny texture shot 
with darker strands, afford, perhaps, a more full 
and expressive picture of his mind than those 
of any other period of his life. 

He found his situation at Southborough for a 
time at least almost wholly to his taste. "... I 
am already," he writes, " in love with South- 
borough, which is a charmingly unadulterated 
New England village and with as lovely land- 



214 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

scapes as I ever saw. I intrench myself in a 
flannel sbirt and wander over the hills and in 
the lonely pastures, rejoicing in the immitigable 
sunshine. 'T is an odd shift in the peep hole of 
my panorama from London to this Chartreuse. 
For the present I like it, and find it wholesome. 
I fancy myself happy sometimes — I am not 
sure — but then I never was for long." ^ 

He spent the winter of 1885 and 1886 chiefly 
at Southborough, though he was for some weeks 
of it in Boston with his sister, Mrs. Putnam, 
whose house was always for him in his latter 
days an alternate home. 

In this year and the following one, Lowell 
made many addresses in various parts of the 
country, chiefly upon literature, with an occa- 
sional aside on politics. And in the winter of 
1885-86, acting in his capacity of professor eme- 
ritus at Harvard, he read Dante for some weeks 
in the second term with a few boys. 

In April he sailed for England to spend the 
summer. This summer seems not to have been 
so satisfactory to him as some of those which 
followed, for the address which he had promised 
to make at the two hundred and fiftieth anniver- 
sary of Harvard in the fall weighed on his mind, 
and his sadder memories of London were still 
fresh. He writes with keen interest of Gladstone 
1 Letters, vol. iii, pp. 135, 136. 



LAST YEARS 215 

and the Home Rule crusade, but the general bur- 
den of his letters for the summer is of an elegiac 
sentiment. He writes to Mr. Norton : " Some- 
times I hear faintly the notes of S 's violin 

singing ' Scheiden, ach Scheiden ! ' and think of 
many things." 

He was back at Deerfoot Farm in October, 
where he was subjected to a peculiarly keen an- 
noyance, when the son of an old friend drew him 
out to some characteristic expressions of his 
hearty likes and dislikes, and afterwards printed 
the whole conversation, somewhat idealized, in a 
New York paper. In November he delivered 
his address at Harvard — a ripe plea for the 
study of those humanities to which his own 
life had been given up. It was thought by some 
that he hardly did justice to the advantages 
of the elective system, and for some weeks 
afterward he was engaged in correspondence 
with various persons concerning his views on 
this matter. 

In the spring of 1887, with a curiously dra- 
matic reversion, he again lectured upon the old 
dramatists before the Lowell Institute of Bos- 
ton. He was also busier with his writing than 
he had been for many years before. In 1887 ho 
published two poems in the " Atlantic," and also 
wrote an introduction to a bi-voluminous work 
entitled " The World's Progress," published by 



216 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

Gately and O'Gorman of Boston. In the spring 
of 1887 he went again to England, where he 
seems to have had a rather better summer than 
the preceding one. As he wrote to his daughter, 
Mrs. Burnett, with whom his correspondence 
was always of an intellectual comradeship not 
very common, perhaps, between fathers and their 
daughters : — 

" I can hardly help laughing sometimes when 
I think how a single step from my hermitage 
takes me into Babylon. Meanwhile it amuses 
and interests me. My own vitality seems to rein- 
force itself as if by some unconscious transfusion 
of the blood from these ever-throbbing arteries 
of life into my own. Upon my word, I think I 
am beginning in my old age to find a more im- 
pressive and poignant solitude in the Great City 
than in the country. I get all the country I want 
in the park, which is within five minutes of me, 
and the song of the thrush is more pathetic 
there, like a quotation of poetry in a dreary page 
of prose." ^ 

After a round of friendly visits, including a 
stay of some weeks in his well-beloved Whitby, 
Lowell returned to Southborough in the fall of 
1887 and devoted himself for some time to the 
preparation of a volume of poems which was 
published with the title " Heartsease and Rue " 
^ Letters, vol. iii, p. 187. 



LAST YEARS 217 

in the spring of 1888. Most of the pieces in it 
were old, some having been printed in the maga- 
zines twenty years before and passed by in 
" Under the Willows," his last previous collec- 
tion ; but some were written at the time the 
volume was in preparation. One of the most 
interesting of these to the student of Lowell's 
poetic development is the " Endymion," a curi- 
ously Shelleyan and mystical piece for a poet 
of near threescore years and ten to write. Two 
letters concerning it, written by Lowell to Mr. 
F. J. Garrison for the publishers, are of sufficient 
interest to print here. They show the significant 
persistence of his sense of inspiration, with a 
growing punctiliousness in revision : — 

Deekfoot Farm, 20th December, 1887. 

Dear Mr. Garrison, — I hoped to have sent 
this ["Endymion "] by Monday morning's post, 
but for two days after my return my head con- 
tinued to be cloggy and my vein would n't flow. 
I have at last managed to give what seems to 
me as much consecutiveness as they need to 
what have been a heap of fragments in my note- 
books for years. Longer revolution in my head 
might round it better, but take it as a meteoro- 
lite, splintery still but with some metallic iri- 
descence here and there brought from some 
volcanic star. Let it come among the poems of 



218 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

sentiment, and, as the longest, first if possible. I 
suppose it is too late for use in the Atlantic ? . . . 
Faithfully yours, 

J. R. Lowell. 

Deebfoot Farm, 5th January, 1887 [sic]. 

Dear Mr. Garrison, — I hope the pages 
with black lines round them are not yet cast. 
In the " Endymion " I miss some verses which 
I omitted and want them back again. There 
is nothing like the first "lively running" after 
all. 

In the " Nest " the first running of one of the 
lines was not lively. I never liked " haggling " 
— 't is a harsh and peddlerish word. But in my 
then hurry I could hit on no other. It has come 
to me now. " Pleading " is softer and what I 
wanted. But this necessitates the change in the 
previous verse to avoid the assonance of " plead '* 
and " repeat." 

I must bother you a little in this way, for I 
like things as good as I can make them, far 
short, as they always are, of what one wishes 
them to be. 

Faithfully yours, 

J. R. Lowell. 

Early in 1888 a committee of the senior class 
of Harvard College forwarded to Lowell a letter 



LAST YEARS 219 

bearing the signature of some five hundred under- 
graduates, begging him to deliver a course of 
lectures upon the English Poets of the Nine- 
teenth Century. Lowell's fine letter in reply 
may fitly be printed here. It was his valediction 
to the old academic pursuits, and it shows amply 
how much his teaching had meant to him, despite 
the whimsical weariness wherewith he habitually 
spoke of it. 



Deerfoot Farm, 7th January, 
To Messrs. James Loeb, Rupert Norton, Her- 
bert D. Hale, Lloyd McKim Garrison, Charles 
Allen Porter, and many others. 
Gentlemen and my very kind friends, — 
I feel not only honored but deeply moved by the 
letter you have been good enough to write me. 
During m}^ long service in the University my 
relations with the students were always agree- 
able, not seldom fruitful, to me, and, in some 
good measure, I trust, to my pupils also. But 
in all my experience as a teacher, nothing ever 
gave me such pleasure as your friendly words. 
The proverb tells us that " he who plants pears 
plants for his heirs." I seem to myself (and it 
is no small gratification to an old man) to be 
tasting fruit from a tree of my own setting as I 
read what you say to me. I shall treasure your 
letter with its long list of signatures as the most 



220 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

precious collection of autographs I could leave 
to my descendants. No doubt many of the 
names will one day have the same price in the 
eyes of the world, as now in mine, but they 
can never suffuse them so pleasantly. I look on 
this document as a kind of quittance from my 
Past. 

But I must take leave to regard it as a nunc 
dimittis too. 

It is very hard to say no to such an appeal, 
and it costs me a struggle to say it. I can scarce 
find in my vocabulary a negative soft enough 
and hesitatino: enouo^h for the occasion. Were I 
living in Cambridge, I should search in vain for 
any such. But so far away as I am, at my great 
age too (who am on the edge of my seventieth 
year) and with the many duties that just now 
demand my instant and exclusive thought — for 
it is high time I should be putting my house in 
order — I feel that I am warranted in denying 
a petition which, under other circumstances, I 
should receive as a command, and in declining a 
duty to which, at least, I could give but half of 
even what strength is left me. 

Begging you to accept my hearty thanks, 
since I can give no more, I remain. 
Very sincerely. 
Your friend and fellow student, 

J. R. Lowell. 



LAST YEARS 221 

Jnst after the publication of " Heartsease and 
Kue " Lowell printed in the " Atlantic " his re- 
markable poem on " Turner's Old Temeraire : 
under a figure symbolizing the Church ; " and on 
the 13th of April in the same year he delivered 
before the Reform Club of New York an ad- 
dress upon " The Place of the Independent iu 
Politics." 

We have seen throughout the story of Lowell's 
life how high was the ideality which he carried 
into politics, and how restive he had always been 
under strict party bonds. Only during the years 
of the war, when the young Republican party 
was still of an idealist temper, was he ever com- 
pletely in harmony with the mood of one of the 
great American political factions. As Minister 
to Spain and to England, he always refused, as 
he said, to have any politics, considering himself 
to represent the country, and no special party in 
it. After his return from England his political 
mood was far from buoyant. Like nearly all 
Anglo-Saxon poets who have not died young, his 
personal temper was increasingly conservative ; 
yet clear-sighted as he was and impatient of 
formulations, it was impossible for him to rest, 
like most conservatives, in an allegiance to a 
party. Indeed he had for many years an earnest 
hope that through the rise of a large and fearless 
body of independent voters a permanent third 



222 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

party might be established, so that the country 
might divide upon rational and permanent is- 
sues, like the tariff and the currency. This 
alignment was now taking place in the two great 
parties, and it was easy to foretell where Low- 
ell's sympathy would lie. His chief patriotic 
wish for a decade had been that, by the estab- 
lishment of a sound civil service, politics might 
be made an honorable and attractive profession 
for the best minds. It naturally came about 
that he was increasingly at odds with the leaders 
in his old party, that he had a growing admira- 
tion and regard for Mr. Cleveland, and that in 
his speeches he expressed very fully and forcibly 
the mood of the more independent wing of the 
Democrats. His political speeches never ceased 
to partake of his old political idealism — of 
the mood of " The Present Crisis " and of the 
"Commemoration Ode," — though they were 
freighted with the sagacity of a man who had 
been a constant reader of history, and who had 
shrewdly observed the operation of many govern- 
ments. How dynamic this was, is apparent in 
the close of the speech on tariff reform, which 
he delivered before the Tariff Reform League 
in Boston, December 29, 1887 : — 

" Many of us remember, as they remember 
fiothing else, the overwhelming rush of that great 
national passion, obliterating all lines of party 



LAST YEARS 223 

division and leveling all the landmarks of ha- 
bitual politics. Who that saw it will ever for- 
get that enthusiasm of loyalty for the flag and 
for what the flag symbolized which twenty-six 
years ago swept all the country's forces of 
thought and sentiment, of memory and hope, into 
the grasp of its overmastering torrent ? Martial 
patriotism touches the heart, kindles the imagi- 
nation, and rouses the nobler energies of men as 
nothing else ever does or can. Even love is a 
paler emotion. That image of our Country with 
the flame of battle in her eyes which every man 
then saw, how beautiful it was, how potent to 
inspire devotion ! But these ecstasies of emotion 
are by their very nature as transient as they are 
ennobling. There is a sedater kind of patriotism, 
less picturesque, less inspiring, but quite as ad- 
mirably serviceable in the prosy days of peace. 
It is the patient patriotism which strives to en- 
lighten public opinion and to redress the balance 
of party spirit, which inculcates civic courage 
and independence of mind, which refuses to ac- 
cept clamor as argument, or to believe that 
phrases become syllogisms by repetition. It is 
this more modest and thoughtful patriotism to 
the exemplifying and practice of which we as- 
pire, and the first lesson it teaches us is that a 
moderated and controlled enthusiasm is, like 
stored electricity, the most powerful of motive 



224 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

forces, and that the reformer of practical abuses, 
springing from economic ignorance or mistake, 
then first begins to be wise when he allows for 
the obstinate vitality of human error and human 
folly, and is willing to believe that those who 
cannot see as he does are not therefore necessa- 
rily bad men." 

This is the final answer to those who re- 
proached Lowell with lukewarm Americanism; 
he was too wise a man to be blind to the faults 
of his country; but he was too true a man not 
to know, with Bacon, that the faults of one's 
country, like those of his natural parents, should 
be dealt with by kindly leading, not by con- 
testation and reproach. 

Lowell's religious belief at the end of liis life 
was of a piece with his political, — doubt sub- 
dued by hope but not killed. Despite the warm 
friendship of his middle age with men of science, 
the doctrines that were advanced by Darwin and 
his followers had always repelled him — perhaps 
because with that affinity of certain of his moods 
for pessimism which we have noticed, he per- 
ceived the temperamental danger for him of evo- 
lutionary doctrines. He had written to Leslie 
Stephen in 1876 : — 

" I continue to shut my eyes resolutely in cer- 
tain speculative directions, and am willing to 



LAST YEARS 225 

find solace in certain intimations that seem to me 
from a region higher than my reason ; " — and 
to Miss Grace Norton in 1879 he wrote of sci- 
ence : " I hate it as a savage does writing, be- 
cause I fear it will hurt me somehow ; " and he 
goes on to say : — 

" I think the evolutionists will have to make a 
fetich of their protoplasm before long. Such a 
mush seems to me a poor substitute for the Rock 
of Ages, by which I understand a certain set of 
higher instincts which mankind have found solid 
under their feet in all weathers." 

On the other hand, it was impossible for Lowell 
to find solace and support in the doctrine of any 
church. " All religious formulations," says Mr. 
Howells, " bored him," — and in his last years 
he replied to the question " Is there a moral gov- 
ernment in the universe ? " gravely and with a 
kind of pain, " The scale is so vast, and we see 
such a little part of it." 

In short, despite the seeming self-deception in 
the letter to Stephen, half of Lowell at heart was 
a man 

" To bear all naked truths, 
And to envisage circumstance all calm." 

As time went on he contrived to make some kind 
of a working reconciliation between his clear-ej^ed 
perception of facts and his poet's sense of invis- 
ible realities. In his essay on " The Progress of 



226 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

the World," he contrived to present the scien- 
tific view of the world hopefully : — 

" The imagination grows giddy," he says, " as 
it looks down along the rounds of the ladder lost, 
save a short stretch of it, in distance below, by 
which life has climbed from the zoophyte to Plato 
to Newton, to Michael Angelo, to Shakespeare." 

Yet he goes on to say of science in a passage of 
full cadenced prose, which has something of the 
accent, if little of the doctrine, of Parson Wilbur : 

" And who shall reproach her with having put 
far away from us the homely and neighborly hea- 
ven of unlettered faith, when she has opened such 
a playground for the outings of speculation, and 
noted in her guide-book so many spacious inns 
for the refreshment of the disembodied spirit on 
its travels, so many and so wondrous magnalia 
for its curiosity and instruction ? To me it seems 
not unreasonable to find a reinforcement of opti- 
mism, a renewal of courage and hope, in the 
modern theory that man has mounted to what 
he is from the lowest step of potentiality, through 
toilsome grades of ever expanding existence, even 
though it have been by a spiral stairway, mainly 
dark or dusty, with loop-holes at long intervals 
only, and these granting but a narrow and one- 
sided view." 

Thus, for all the human sorrow with which 
Lowell sees a dismantled church dragged away, 



LAST YEARS 227 

like the old Temeraire, by the tug of science, to 
a forlorn anchorage, he does contrive to absorb 
the results of science into his mood of larger 
idealism and keep a faithful heart. In the long 
run, it was the poetry of life that was to Lowell 
the chief incentive to faith ; for him the infinite 
wonder of the world as it was presented to his 
sensitive spirit held a certitude and a promise. 
His last word upon it is in the epilogue to his 
lectures upon the old dramatists, which fitly 
stands at the end of his collected works : — 

" I cannot bid you farewell without thanking 
you for the patience with which you have fol- 
lowed me to the end. I may have seemed some- 
times to be talking to you of things that would 
weigh but as thistle-down in the great business- 
scales of life. But I have an old opinion, 
strengthening with years, that it is as important 
to keep the soul alive as the body : nay, that it 
is the life of the soul which gives all its value to 
that of the body. Poetry is a criticism of life 
only in the sense that it furnishes us with the 
standard of a more ideal felicity, of calmer plea- 
sures and more majestic pains. I am glad to see 
that what the understanding would stigmatize as 
useless is coming back into books written for 
children, which at one time threatened to become 
more and more drearily practical and didactic. 
The fairies are permitted once more to imprint 



228 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

their rings on the tender sward of the child's 
fancy, and it is the child's fancy that often lives 
obscurely on to minister solace to the lonelier and 
less sociable mind of the man. Our nature resents 
the closing up of the windows on its emotional 
and imaginative side, and revenges itself as it 
can. I have observed that many who deny the 
inspiration of Scripture hasten to redress their 
balance by giving a reverent credit to the reve- 
lations of inspired tables and camp-stools. In a 
last analysis it may be said that it is to the sense 
of Wonder that all literature of the Fancy and 
of the Imagination appeals. I am told that this 
sense is the survival in us of some savage ances- 
tor of the age of flint. If so, I am thankful to 
him for his longevity, or his transmitted nature, 
whichever it may be. But I have my own suspi- 
cion sometimes that the true age of flint is before, 
and not behind us, an age hardening itself more 
and more to those subtle influences which ransom 
our lives from the captivity of the actual, from 
that dungeon whose warder is the Giant Despair. 
Yet I am consoled by thinking that the siege of 
Troy will be remembered when those of Vicks- 
burg and Paris are forgotten. One of the old 
dramatists, Thomas Hey wood, has, without mean- 
ing it, set down for us the uses of the poets ; — 

* They cover us with cotinsel to defend ns 
From storms without; they polish us within 



LAST YEARS 229 

With learning, knowledge, arts, and disciplines; 
All that is nought and vicious they sweep from us 
Like dust and cobwebs; our rooms concealed 
Hang with the costliest hangings 'bout the walls, 
Emblems and beauteous symbols pictured round.' " 

In the summer of 1888, Lowell was again in 
England for the third time since his return from 
his English mission. As usual, a good part of 
the time was spent in his familiar lodgings at 
Whitby. Here he lived in great content in a 
little suite of rooms in the house of the Misses 
Galilee, bj^ whom, according to a writer in the 
Contributors' Club of the " Atlantic Monthly," 
he was long remembered as the kindest and 
most considerate of guests. " You could see that 
he was a great man," they said. Yet their recol- 
lection of his talk shows that it was often melan- 
choly, with many an allusion to age and feeble- 
ness. Indeed, from this time onward, save for a 
few brief seasons of relief, Lowell was a prey to 
very serious ill health. For thirty years he had 
been occasionally troubled with the gout. So 
early as 1858 we find him humorously complain- 
ing that he has the gout so that he " can't go 
out," and lamenting his in-great-toe otio ; but as 
we have seen, the affliction was not very serious 
until the two years of his stay in Europe in 1872 
and 1873. Thence onward the attacks grew 
more frequent and severe, until in 1888 this con- 



230 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

stitutional malady gave way to the cancerous 
growth which was to cause his death. 

Nevertheless, despite his ill health and hours 
of loneliness, the sadness that occasionally ap- 
pears in his letters is almost always merged in 
some passage now of cheerful humor, now of pure 
fun. It would be hard to find a more shining 
instance of the persistent continuity of temper- 
ament. The Lowell who, more than half a cen- 
tury before, had been able to find in humor a 
relief from what seemed then a tragic disap- 
pointment in love ; who by its aid weathered his 
years of storm and stress and became succes- 
sively the chief wit of the Band, the author 
of the "Fable for Critics," of the " Biglow 
Papers," and of thousands of gay letters, was 
the same Lowell who now, at the end, still made 
shift to look at the world humorously and bravely. 
The eternal boy, which is so durable a strain in 
the temperament of genius, was as exuberant in 
Lowell in these last days as he had ever been 
in the years of his actual boyhood ; though there 
is a certain lurking pathos in his expression that 
is not of youth. He wrote at the end of a letter 
to two young English friends in the fall of 
1890: — 

" If you ever see me again within any reason- 
able time, you will be shyer of me, I am grown 



LAST YEARS 231 

so young. You won't be able to treat me as if I 
were shelved among the old 70's any more. But 
I will try to be as old as I can. . . . Good-bye. 
" Affectionately yours, 

" GlACOPO IL RiNGIOVENUTO." 

After his return from England in the fall of 
1888 Lowell busied himself with some miscel- 
laneous writing, the preparation and delivery of 
several addresses, and a great deal of reading. In 
February he made a visit to Washington, where 
his son-in-law, Mr. Edward Burnett, was a mem- 
ber of Congress. He found the brief return to 
official society rather amusing, and renewed his 
acquaintance with Mr. Cleveland, much to his 
satisfaction. 

On the 30th of April he delivered an address 
upon " Our Literature " at the celebration in 
New York of the one hundredth anniversary of 
Washington's inaugural. This, another of his 
valedictions, shows a vast ripening, but little 
other change from the position he had taken 
in that introductory editorial to " The Pioneer '* 
forty-five years before. It is still a natural^ 
rather than a provincially national^ literature 
for which he pleads, yet he concludes in a strain 
of hopeful but collected prophecy : — 

" The literature of a people should be the 
record of its joys and sorrows, its aspirations and 



232 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

its shortcomings, its wisdom and its folly, the 
confidant of its soul. We cannot say that our own 
as yet suffices us, but I believe that he who 
stands a hundred years hence where I am stand- 
ing now, conscious that he speaks to the most 
powerful and prosperous community ever devised 
or developed by man, will speak of our literature 
with the assurance of one who beholds what we 
hope for and aspire after, become a reality and a 
possession forever." 

In the spring of 1889 he wrote an essay upon 
Izaak Walton to serve as introduction to a new 
edition of ** The Compleat Angler." The con- 
stant mellowing of his powers to the end is 
manifest in this essay. For form, proportion, 
harmony, and the measured accent that carries 
conviction, as well as for lively grace, the essay 
upon Walton is surely one of his finest. It is 
hard to withhold a " tu quoque " when he con- 
cludes with the happy line, — 

" Fortunate senex ! ergo tua rura manebunt." 

At the end of May, 1889, Lowell sailed for 
what was to be his last visit to England. As 
usual, the greater part of his stay was at Whitby, 
whence he wrote to Mrs. W. E. Darwin : — 

" The charm of this place and the kind-heart- 
edness of the weather have Capuaed me here 
longer than I meant. 



LAST YEARS 233 

"There is no use in trying to tell you how 
beautiful our moors have been — pensively gor- 
geous like the purple mourning that used to be 
worn for kings — as if they were still commemo- 
rating the lonely funerals of the chieftains whose 
barrows crown ilieir summits. And our Abbey 
— didn't I see it a few nights ago with the 
moon shining through its windows till one fan- 
cied it lighted up for service with corpse-lights 
for candles, and heard the ghostly miserere of 
the monks over their ruins ? And then its fan- 
tastic transformation by the sea-mists ! Do you 
wonder that I linger ? " ^ 

When Lowell came back to America in the fall 
of 1889, it was to live once more at Elmwood, 
with his daughter, Mrs. Burnett, and her children 
as his housemates. " I watch the moon," he writes 
to Lady Lyttelton, " rise behind the same trees 
through which I first saw it seventy years ago and 
have a strange feeling of permanence, as if I 
should watch it seventy years longer." 

He occupied himself in the winter of 1889 and 
1890 in revising and preparing for the press the 
collected edition of his works in poetry and prose, 
which was published in ten volumes in 1890. He 
also did some reading in preparation for the life 
of Hawthorne which he had been asked to pre- 
pare for the American Men of Letters Series; 
1 Letters, vol. iii, pp. 249, 250. 



234 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

but never went any further with it. He wrote 
some verses which were printed in the maga- 
zines ; and lie seems, indeed, to have been anxious 
for prudential reasons to write as much as pos- 
sible. His profits at this time from the royalties 
on his books were only two thousand dollars a 
year, and his other income was not always quite 
adequate to his generous desires. In sending a 
group of poems to Mr. T. B. Aldrich, then 
editor of the " Atlantic," he wrote : — 

Elmwood, Cambridge, Mass., 
8th May, 1890. 

Dear Aldrich, — If you think these things 
worthy a place in the "Atlantic," send me a 
hundred dollars and print 'em. If not, return 'em 
and I will find a market elsewhere. I must pay 
my doctor's bills. I was very near leaving 'era 
for my heirs to pay, which would have saved me 
money, but it was ordered that I should n't go yet. 
They are not potboilers, these things, though I 
now thrust them under the pot. The sonnet 
I have been carrying about in my head these six 
years and at last wrote it down to try whether my 
wits were damaged or no. Perhaps they are — 
you must judge. The Fielding I had forgotten 
and found written on the back of a letter. I wrote 
it when I unveiled the bust of F. at Taunton, but 
never offered it to the burghers of that town. 



LAST YEARS 235 

I am very well, I think, and loiter about my 
grounds a little, but Dr. Wyman insists that I 
shall be quiet, and especially that I shall not walk 
more than a quarter of a mile a day, which is 
prison rations for me. He was here just now and 
I thought he would raise his interdict, but he 
would n't. 

Faithfully yours, 

J. E. Lowell. 

The ill health referred to at the close of this 
letter became graver and still graver. He had 
been very dangerously ill in the spring of 1890, 
and though he recovered, it was only to have 
relapse follow relapse until the end. He told 
Mr. Howells that he had gone to Beaver Brook 
and tried to jump from one stone to another in 
the stream but had to give it up, and he said, 
without completing his sentence, " If it has come 
to that with me ! " — 

It was, of course, out of the question for him to 
make his wonted trip to England in the summer ; 
but he was in part compensated for this loss by a 
visit from Leslie Stephen, the closest of his Eng- 
lish friends, who spent some weeks with him at 
Elmwood in the summer ; and he occupied his 
mind in writing an introduction to Milton's 
" Areopagitica," published by the Grolier Club 
of New York. With a brief paper in the Con- 



236 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

tributors' Club of the " Atlantic," this was his 
last prose. 

Through the winter of 1890 and 1891 his 
health wavered, and he was able to go about but 
little and to do little serious reading. He read 
endless novels, however, in which he found a 
singular pleasure. As he wrote to Leslie Ste- 
phen, " I never read so many before, I think, 
in my life, and they come to me as fresh as the 
fairy tales of my boyhood." He helped his grand- 
children, somewhat modestly, with their Greek, 
and played with his dogs. He wrote to Mrs. 
Stephen in February, 1891 : — 

" I wish you could see the dogs lying before 
my fire, each making a pillow of the other and 
looking around to me from time to time lest I 
should forget that they loved me. Human eyes 
have generally precious little soul in them, but 
with theirs there comes sometimes the longing 
for a soul and almost overtaking it that is des- 
perately touching." This is the last of the nu- 
merous allusions in his letters to the canine 
succession of Argus, Bessie, Bram, Stoker, Panks, 
and Gobble. He had been aU his life as true a 
dog-lover as Sir Walter Scott. 

Perhaps the most vivid picture we have of him 
at the last is that written by a young English- 
man, who, having known Lowell in his London 
days, had gone to see him at Elmwood in the 



LAST YEARS 237 

spring of 1891. As Lowell, gray and ill, stood 
in the doorway of Elm wood, saying farewell, there 
came from over the way a strain of music which, 
as he said, he had last heard at a brilliant assem- 
bly in London. It gave him, as it seemed, a flash- 
ing memory of all his rich and various life, so 
pathetically near its end. 

In the hot July of 1891 Lowell fell ill of the 
gravest attack of his malady that he had yet suf- 
fered. After some days a delirium came upon 
him, in which he fancied he was meeting royal 
personages and seemed continually imploring to 
be taken home to Elmwood. The delirium passed, 
but the end was near. On the 12th of August he 
died. 

Lowell the Man. 

Looking backward over the various life whose 
secret unity we have endeavored to recapture, 
two things should be plain : it was a true vita 
vitalis wherein action and dream played each 
its due part ; and, after the fever of youth was 
over, the man who lived it ripened and mel- 
lowed consistently to the end. In one of those 
passages of his essay on Dante, where his hu- 
manist's witch -wand of sympathetic imagination 
pointed most sensitively to the springs of char- 
acter, Lowell says that the Tuscan poet was 
shaped by " rank, ease, love, study, affairs, state- 



238 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

craft, hope, exile, hunger, dependence, despair." 
Lowell himself knew all the more beneficent dis- 
ciplines of this series, and, allowing for the softer 
conditions of modern life, he was not ignorant of 
tlieir bitter brethren. His life was indeed marked 
by a certain propitious continuity ; it held more 
of leisure than most men's ; it had few tragic 
crises, few frustrations ; yet beneath its seeming 
happy content black waters ran. He knew well 
the pain of human loss by death, and he knew 
another duller, more numbing pain, as, one after 
another, four members of his household suffered 
mental disease. So he was shaped into the wise, 
humorous, graciously human man still remem- 
bered by many as better than anything he ever 
wrote. 

Yet, like all humanists, he was something of 
a problem to his lovers, to his critics, and to him- 
self. In particular on the great question : Was 
he simple, or was he subtle ? there are clashing 
voices. Mr. Henry James, with the habitual de- 
siTe of a subtle man to find other seemingly subtle 
fellows simple, says ; " He had no experimental 
sympathies, and no part of him was traitor to 
the rest. . . . Subtlety in his intelligence found 
expression in linguistics." 

Mr. Howells, on the other hand, with his sen- 
sitive perception of temperament says : " His 
nature was not always serene or pellucid ; it was 



LAST YEARS 239 

sometimes roiled by the currents that counter 
and cross in all of us : but it was without the 
least alloy of insincerity, and it was never dark- 
ened by the shadow of a selfish fear." 

Lowell himself, with the partial knowledge of 
introspection, is constantly writing of warring 
impulses and tendencies in himself, captained 
now, as in his lyrical fairy tale '^ Uncle Cobus's 
Story," by '' Fan-ta-si-a " (by which we may un- 
derstand " the Spence negligence ") and " El- 
bo-gres," now by the spirits of Hope and De- 
spair. Yet Leslie Stephen — wisest of critics of 
essential character — has recorded that his chief 
impression of Lowell, after years of the closest 
intimacy, was " of his unvarying sweetness and 
simplicity ... of unmixed kindliness and thor- 
ough wholesomeness of nature." 

Viewing Lowell's life as a whole, the truth 
may perhaps be seen to occupy its customary 
medial position. Psychologically, with his visions 
and his recurrent disturbing sense of secondary 
personality, he was undoubtedly highly complex. 
So was he, also, temperamentally, with his con- 
flicting inherited impulses toward idleness and 
action. He was complex and subtle in his in- 
tellect, with its vast variety of mental furniture, 
its odd irrelevancies, its unstable union of skepti- 
cism and faith. All these diverse qualities went 
to make up a " myriad-minded " humanist, who 



240 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

had in his own phrase something of the " multa- 
nimous nature of the poet " and longed for many- 
lives and many careers. Yet, air-spun as the dis- 
tinction may seem, the complexity in Lowell was 
only in his psychology, temperament, intellect ; 
his character was all the while simple and sin- 
cere. 

This unity in variety which is the law of any 
sound and vital personality appears in all his 
traits. The one irreducible factor in his equa- 
tion was an irrepressible whimsicality of a kind 
more often found in low-voltage men than in 
men of Lowell's grade of power. In part it was 
the mere ebullition of animal spirits, in part it 
was the froth that is blown from deep-tossing 
waters. Doubtless the attrition of an earnest 
New England environment upon "the Spence 
negligence " fostered it. But it is as idle to in- 
quire further into its origins as to regret it. 
Lowell's boyish readiness to laugh at the wrong 
time certainly gave rise to blemishes in his poetry 
and in his prose, yet it was part and parcel of 
the mood that gave us the *' Biglow Papers " 
and of the essence of his most delightful self. 
Lowell was not one of those shadowy whimsi- 
calists in whom sentimentalizing whimsies slowly 
sap the foundations of character. Hence his 
irony was in the employ of optimism — not of 
pessimism. It consorted oddly with that rigid 



LAST YEARS 241 

Puritanism which no true-born New Englander 
wholly outgrows, but never disintegrated it. 

Indeed, not in " Humanism " but in " Puri- 
tanism " do we find, after all, the secret unity 
of Lowell's character. Throughout his formal 
writing from first to last, as well as in his fa- 
miliar letters, we never cease to feel under all 
his chameleon play of mood a solid core of char- 
acter in which the deep sense of personal re- 
sponsibility is the principle of life. In all his 
prose there is no more characteristic passage 
than that in his essay on Dante, where he 
says : — 

" Very hateful to his fervid heart and sincere 
mind would have been the modern theory which 
deals with sin as involuntary error, and by shift- 
ing off the fault to the shoulders of Atavism or 
those of Society, personified for purposes of ex- 
cuse, but escaping into impersonality again from 
the grasp of retribution, weakens that sense of 
responsibility which is the root of self-respect 
and the safeguard of character." Here, if I mis- 
take not, is the very voice of the Puritan spirit. 

But though these subtleties of temperament 
are closely related to certain contradictions in 
Lowell's printed work, they certainly were of 
little account to the people who knew and loved 
him as a man. 



242 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

Barring certain occasional hauteurs not unbe- 
coming in "the Marquis of Thompson's Lot," in 
whom many men were always conscious of an 
older and finer civilization than their own, and 
barring that active detestation of " Bores " in 
which his writings abound, Lowell was a thor- 
oughly generous-minded and lovable man. His 
yearning for personal affection was expressed 
almost tremulously everywhere in his letters. 
They are full of phrases like " You must try to 
like me," " So long as you like me, I don't care 
how you like my work," and " I want you to like 
me," repeated and repeated again to both men 
and women. Nor do his correspondents appear 
to have been at all backward in responding to 
his wish. Throughout his life we find traces of 
the Platonic warmth of his friendship, and dis- 
cover how in our so critical and quizzical age he 
preserved a certain young, transcendental ardor 
of affection, and was curiously unashamed of the 
frank expression of it. Up to middle life his 
friendships were chiefly with men. Like his own 
Fitz Adam he seems a little to have misliked 

woman, 

" Not from cross or whim, 
But that his mother shared too much in him." 

From about his fiftieth year onward, however, 
as the more masculine side of his nature was de- 
veloped by dealing with affairs, the most inti- 



LAST YEARS 243 

mate of his new friendships came by a natural 
paradox to be with high-bred, rich-natured 
women, in Spain, in England, and at home. 

His sympathies never lost the true humanist's 
scope. From first to last he had a keen gust for 
" the gamy flavor of the bookless man," and was 
always eager for a chat with some salty sailor- 
man or racy-tongued guide. Though when os- 
tentatiously uncollared humanity appeared in 
Literature with a song of itself and the Cosmos, 
the Marquis of Thompson's Lot was pretty sure 
to dislike it. 

People liked to be with Lowell not alone be- 
cause of his charming talk ; his person was as 
pleasing as his sensitive perceptions or his pic- 
turesque animation of phrase. He was five feet 
seven inches in height, a little inclined to be 
stout, but brisk and vigorous. His coloring was 
fresh and ruddy, with hair and beard of a bright 
reddish brown that never wholly faded into gray. 
His eyes, in their setting of kindly wrinkles, 
telling of humorous judgments and bookish days 
and nights, were of a clear blue-gray. They were 
described by a work-woman in the house of one 
of his friends as the " coaxinest eyes." His voice 
was of a pleasant tone and quality, and his man- 
ner of speech was always that of one who had a 
respect for his native tongue. 

This was the man his friends knew and loved, 



244 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

notwitlistanding the sliglitly exaggerated man- 
ner that strangers sometimes misunderstood. 
With an almost lapidary concision, Holmes has 
expressed a friend's view of Lowell in a single 
stanza of his memorial poem : — 

** The singer whom we long have held so dear 

Was Nature's darling, shapely, strong, and fair, — 
Of keenest wit, of judgment crystal-clear, 
Easy of converse, courteous, debonair." 



CHAPTER VII 

Lowell's poetey 

In the chapters that have gone before, the 
writer's endeavor was to look at the world 
through Lowell's eyes, to see his work as his 
contemporaries saw it, to know the man as his 
friends knew him. But in this and the following 
chapter his affair is one of objective criticism. 
It is time now to consider Lowell's written work 
in the cool, undeceptive light of " ce lendemain 
severe'''' — that dispassionate to-morrow in which 
whatever a man's work has of caducity or of 
vitality is seen for what it is. 

Lowell was but five years old when Tennyson, 
aged fourteen, chiseled Byron is Dead upon a 
rock at Somersby, and " the whole world seemed 
darkened for him." Yet with that tardiness that 
long marked our literature, America, in the thir- 
ties, was the intellectual contemporary of Eng- 
land in the teens, and in much of his earliest 
poetry Lowell partook of the Byronic mood, a 
little colored by the related mood of Blair and 
Young, who still helped to sway cis-Atlantic 



246 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

poetic taste. His undergraduate verse, in its 
satirical sallies, its easy world pain, its occupa- 
tion with nocturnal mystery and melancholy, 
held a Byronism that was symptomatic of the 
author's time and place even more than of his 
own youthful predicament. Yet in his first vol- 
ume, printed in 1841, Byronism is not conspicu- 
ous. Transcendentalism is now his motive, and 
Spenser, his early love, is the poet from whom his 
imagery mostly derives, though occasional echoes 
of Tennyson, Keats, Wordsworth, Landor, and 
the Jacobeans begin to be heard. In the 1844 
volume the old writers are more and the moderns 
less in evidence. Thence onward, as his poetry 
became more and more " a definite faculty " in- 
stead of " a boundless sense of power," it be- 
came the more self-expressive ; it was, in a sense, 
increasingly bookish, yet decreasingly imitative. 
One of the most constant and characteristic 
qualities of the verse in the two volumes published 
in 1841 and 1844, and in his pieces in periodi- 
cals within those years, was a certain weird nes? 
amounting at times to extravagance, of imagery. 
The macabre^ the supernatural, the fantastic, " a 
Mermaid's green eyelash," — these were the 
things his imagination ran riot with, and doubt- 
less they were the images found poetic by his 
early readers. Yet for a reader to-day they pos. 
sess no illusion. They open no vistas of perilous 



LOWELL'S POETRY 247 

seas, and the veritable horns of elfland are not 
heard in them. Yet in these two volumes there 
were a few poems that are still memorable. These 
were mainly of two classes, — the sincere and 
fervent poems to Maria White, and the am- 
bitious pieces on national issues ; — though there 
were two or three brief swallow flights of pure 
song that stand apart from either, like the happy, 
haunting lines beginning 

" O moonhght deep and tender, 
A year and more agone." . . . 

In the decade between 1844 and 1854 all the 
varieties of poetic mood confusedly expressed in 
these two early volumes found riper and more 
effective utterance. Faulty as the poem is, 
Lowell's mystical impulse became for once mas- 
terly and convincing in " Sir Launfal ; " and 
after this katharsis, so to say, it appeared less 
frequently in his later work, yet more often as 
a source of poetic power. His patriotic feeling 
found a fuller, more compelling voice in the 
" Biglow Papers," and his deep domestic affec- 
tions a more penetrating human utterance in such 
poems as " She Came and Went " and " The 
Changeling." Finally in the "Fable for Critics," 
as well as in the " Biglow Papers," Lowell's 
fluent, irrepressible wit came into its own. Then, 
after six years of infrequent and faltering use 



248 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

of his poetic faculty, came the war with its deep 
passion that rapt him to a poetic height which 
before and after he vainly struggled to climb. 
Yet something of the energy imparted to his 
mood persisted, and despite his editorial and 
academic pursuits he wrote considerably more 
verse and of a better quality in the six years 
following the war than in the ten years before. 
But even in the interesting " Cathedral " he 
never quite recaptured the old afflatus, though 
a notable improvement is evident in the firmness 
of his workmanship. Noting this advance in his 
Journal in 1868, Emerson added significantly: 
" It is in talent rather than in poetic tone, and 
rather expresses his wish, his ambition, than the 
uncontrollable poetic impulse which is the au- 
thentic mark of a new poem." 

In his " Agassiz," as we have seen, Lowell 
was again rapt out of himself, and that ode surely 
bore " the authentic mark " of poetry. The three 
memorial poems written in 1875 and 1876 bore 
it, too, if a little less manifestly. During the 
decade of his diplomatic life, Lowell's poetry was 
occasional, — the by-product of a man of elegant 
scholarship and poetic gifts of imagination and 
humor, busily employed in large affairs. In the 
last five years of his life, when he was again va- 
cant to the Muses, there was, in such poems as 
" Endymion," a curious reversion to his earlier 



LOWELL'S POETRY 249 

mystical manner. But the characteristic pieces 
of this period were those like " Turner's Old 
Temeraire," in which his poet's faith took issue 
as best it could with modern doubt. So far was 
there from being any decay of his talent that, 
leaving out of consideration a few casual pieces 
written for autograph albums and personal oc- 
casions, his work at threescore and ten will 
stand a careful scrutiny of its poetic tone and 
texture better than all but a very little that went 
before. 

In considering Lowell's poetry in relation to 
his life, it is thus seen to be admirable and finely 
expressive ; if, however, we take up the volume 
of his Complete Poetical Works and try to view 
it steadily as it is in itself, the result is at first 
a little disconcerting. With the exception of a 
few pieces, such, for example, as '' The Courtin' '* 
and " The Nightingale in the Study," it contains 
no " clear, un wrinkled song ; " and the great bulk 
of the pieces in it have a way of eluding the 
memory after repeated readings that is unique 
even among poets of the nineteenth century. In 
the final edition of Lowell's poetical works some 
three hundred pieces are included. None, per- 
haps, is devoid of images of suggestive beauty, 
of valiant phrases, and haunting music. A sin- 
cere poetic feeling can be discerned in all. Yet 



250 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

not more than one third leave any permanent 
trace in the memory, and — ■ leaving out of con- 
sideration the longer poems, like the " Fable 
for Critics " and the " Biglow Papers," which 
must be attended to apart — less than fifty pos- 
sess any vivid poetic life. The making of selec- 
tions can never be quite impersonal, yet by gen- 
eral suffrage as well as by the writer's personal 
predilection, the following group of shorter pieces 
may reasonably be taken as the most likely can- 
didates for length of days. " Irene," " My Love," 
" O moonlight deep and tender," '' To M. W., on 
her Birthday," " Beloved, in the noisy city here," 
" In Absence," " I thought our love at fall," 
" The Shepherd of King Admetus," " An Inci- 
dent in a Railroad Car," " Hebe," " The Present 
Crisis," " To the Dandelion," " She Came and 
Went," " The Changeling," " Bibliolatres," 
" The Courtin'," '' The First Snow-Fail," " The 
Wind-Harp," " Auf Wiedersehen," "After 
the Burial," *' The Dead House," *' Invita 
Minerva," "The Darkened Mind," "A Winter- 
Evening Hymn to my Fire," " Aladdin," " To 
Charles Eliot Norton," " To H. W. L.," " An 
Invitation," " An Ember Picture," " The Night- 
ingale in the Study," "The Foot^Path," *^The 
Washers of the Shroud," " Ode recited at the 
Harvard Commemoration," " Ode on the Hun- 
dredth Anniversary of the Fight at Concord 



LOWELL'S POETRY 251 

Bridge," "Under the Old Elm," *' An Ode for 
the Fourth of July," " Agassiz," '' Bankside," "An 
Epistle to George William Curtis," *' Phoebe," 
"Das Ewig-Weibliche," " Monna Lisa," "On 
Burning Some Old Letters," " Death of Queen 
Mercedes," "The Pregnant Comment," "The 
Origin of Didactic Poetry," " Turner's Old 
Temeraire." 

In a volume made up of these poems with the 
" Biglow Papers " added, and possibly " Sir 
Launfal " and the " Fable for Critics," we should 
have a part of Lowell's poetry vastly greater 
than the whole, which would make no mean 
showing beside the selected best of his American 
and English contemporaries. 

If, now, we contrast the mood and quality of the 
numerous unnamed remainder with the mood and 
quality of the pieces tabulated above, we may 
perhaps arrive at the truth about Lowell as a 
poet. 

By a not unnatural paradox, the deep poetic 
wonder at the world which was the principle of 
life in Lowell's best work was of the body of 
corruption in — shall we say ? — his least best. 
The treachery of wonder as a poetic impulse 
lies in the fact that the mood of wonder is so 
elusive of communication. Lowell's visionary 
faculty was continually active. His eyes, like 
Coleridge's, " made pictures when they were 



252 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

shut ; " a Doppelgiinger, he said, was his inti- 
mate, and " weird seizures " were frequent with 
him. He not seldom imagined himself " dis- 
persed through space in some inconceivable 
fashion, and mixed with the milky way." ^ With 
the detached, unmystical Yankee half of him, he 
always held to the subjectivity of these experi- 
ences, yet such curious psychological states were 
indissolubly connected in his mind with his 
deepest sense of inspiration. In such seasons 
of complete poetic rapture as those in which 
he composed the " Commemoration Ode " and 
" Agassiz," his mystic's sense of " pure being " 
enabled him to paint those apparent pictures of 
unapparent realities, which, as Zoroaster said 
long ago, are the essence of poetry. But at other, 
cooler times his mixture with the milky way was 
the cause of his failure. There is a wan suffu- 
sion of mystical light, but no single bright stanza 
like a star. Too often there is some word or 
phrase that lets in a shaft of intellectual day, or 
of gaslight, that dispels the illusion of the 
whole. 

A dissimilar yet kindred trait in his poetic 
constitution, which went far to invalidate his 
mystical sense, was his invincible tendency to 
the centrifugal amplification of his ideas. No 
one was better aware of this than Lowell hira- 

1 Letters, iii, p. 28. 



LOWELL'S POETRY 253 

self ; none phrased it better. So early as 1839, 
he writes with a shrewd self-judgment that the 
defect of his poetry is that it has "too many 
thoughts and too little thought^ Yet never 
during his life was he wholly able to repress 
his fertility in brilliant, imperfectly apposite 
" thoughts." The expression of his views and 
opinions meant more to him — in all save his 
most ecstatic poetic moods — than the produc- 
tion of a perfect poem ; and he was never stead- 
ily able to distinguish between the stress of 
opinions seeking utterance and the pure poetic 
impulse.^ Of this, too, he was fully conscious, 
and, as usual, phrased it finally : "I shall 
never be a poet," he writes in his middle life, 
" until I get out of the pulpit, and New England 
was all meeting-house when I was growing up." 
Lowell's habitual mood and manner of compo- 
sition were not of a sort to correct his less ad- 
mirable poetic tendencies. The prodigious speed 
with which he composed the " Commemoration 
Ode" was not at ail exceptional with him. He 
was wont to write the first draft of a poem in 
pencil, and he frequently records of some piece 
that in writing it his pencil never hesitated, or 

^ In one of his commonplace books there is an entry throw- 
ing a curious lig-ht on this condition of mind : " 'T is only 
while we are forming our opinions that we are very anxious to 
propagate them." 



254 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

made a correction afterward. "Prometheus" 
was written in eight hours, the " Fable for 
Critics " " literally in a few hours," etc., etc. In 
short, through the first half of his poetic career 
he never composed ; he effused. Sujflaminandus 
erat. The germ of a poem was delightful to him, 
but he had no pleasure in working it out to for- 
mal perfection. 

The unfortunate results of this are nowhere to 
be seen more clearly than in " The Vision of Sir 
Launfal," wherein there is not only bad metrifi- 
cation of misplaced anapaests but also a structure 
in which there is such want of correspondence in 
two nominally similar parts as to mislead the 
average reader as to the very meaning of the 
narrative. Most of the numerous commentators 
upon " Sir Launfal " have interpreted the poem 
as if the young knight actually adventured the 
quest and returned from it at the end of years, 
broken and old. Yet if the reader will take up 
the poem with a fresh and candid eye, giving 
particular attention to the closing lines of the 
first strophe of Part First, — 

"Slowly Sir Launfal's eyes grew dim, 

Slumber fell like a cloud on him, 
And into his soul the vision flew," — 

and to the ninth strophe of Part Second, — 
" Sir Launfal awoke as from a swound : 
* The Grail in my castle here is found I ' " etc., — 



LOWELL'S POETRY 255 

he will see that Lowell intended to narrate what 
his title indicates, only a " Vision^'' that Sir 
Launfal never left his castle at all, and that the 
period of time presented in the poem is but 
a single night. A critic holding a special brief 
for Lowell the poet might plausibly lay this 
curious and common misinterpretation at the 
door of purblind annotators and careless readers. 
Yet this would be but a half truth, for the fact 
stands that the structure of the " Vision " proper, 
bisected as it is by the " Prelude to Part Sec- 
ond," of seemingly coordinate importance with 
the " Prelude to Part First," is equivocal to an 
astonishing degree, and that through half a cen- 
tury nine readers out of ten have mistaken 
Lowell's meaning. " The Vision of Sir Launfal " 
is in mood and intention a noble poem, — more 
noble, perhaps, and poetic, when interpreted 
as Lowell meant it should be, — yet no service 
is done its author's poetic fame by blinking its 
faults of st3de and structure. 

In his later years, as Lowell's artistic sense 
ripened through long practice and much critical 
writing, his revision became, as we have seen, 
laborious, sometimes even a little fidgety. Of 
the composition of " The Cathedral " he says, for 
instance, " I wrote in pencil, then copied it out 
in ink, and worked over it as I never worked 
over anything before. I may fairly say that 



256 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

there is not a word in it over which I have not 
thought, not an objection which I did not foresee 
and maturely consider." Yet even after this man- 
ner of work had become habitual with him, his 
revision was always stylistic rather than structu- 
ral, and he most commonly, as he confessed, re- 
, turned to his first draft at the end. He could 
never quite bring himself to practice the immor- 
talizing art of the poetic goldsmith, to enrich by 
cutting away. 

"The Grecian gluts me with its perfeetness," 

wrote Lowell in " The Cathedral," and it was 
always a peculiarity of his taste to care little for 
the formal beauties of any classic art, to take 
deeper delight in an emphatically expressive 
gargoyle than in a faultless column. Given this 
native bias of taste and his habitude of the im- 
provisatore, and it is not surprising that so many 
of his poems should be spotted with gargoyles of 
phrase. *' The Cathedral " itself is of course the 
most numerously bedecked of all his poems with 
this style of ornamentation, and in view of the 
subject, not inappropriately. Yet even here 
scores of lines like 

" Plastering our swallow-nests on the awful Past," 

seem needlessly gnarled. In other poems a single 
violent phrase is sometimes enough to damage 
the piece irreparably. 



LOWELL'S POETRY 257 

The list of Lowell's indiscretions of phrase is 
a long one and has been often enough presented. 
It is but a piece of minor corroborating evidence 
of that lack of utter energy of conception, of 
completely painstaking craftsmanship, which 
made so large a proportion of his poems fall 
short of his own best, and of the poetic best of 
men who were his inferiors in general literary 
ability. To recognize how lacking the body of 
Lowell's work — exclusive of the "Biglow Pa- 
pers " and the happy handful set apart above — 
is in true poetic distinction, one has but to try 
to parody it convincingly, or to take a charac- 
teristic piece like his lines " On a Portrait of 
Dante by Giotto," and compare it with such a 
poem as Parsons's " On a Bust of Dante." The 
mood of the one is as truly poetic as that of 
the other, but Parsons's poem has eternalizing 
form and Lowell's has not. 

But save when too facile admiration tends to 
confuse our standards of judgment, the reproba- 
tion of faults in a dead poet's work is ungrate- 
ful business. The defects of Lowell's poetic 
quality, the source of the impermanence of the 
greater part of his poetry, has been dwelt on 
at quite sufficient length ; it will be pleasanter 
and more profitable to look for the secret of 
the abiding charm of that handful of "best 



258 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

poems " whereby he will, as a poet, be remem- 
bered. 

If there is one trait which more than any other 
distinguishes Lowell's poetry at its best, it is the 
utter and fervent sincerity of the moods ex- 
pressed in it. 

" You will have noticed," he writes in 1868, 
" that many of the poems in my book are moody 
— perhaps unhealthy. ... I was mainly induced 
to print them that I might get rid of them by 
shutting them between two covers." And return- 
ing to the subject in another letter written seven 
years later he says : " I suppose it must have 
been the extreme solitude in which I grew up, 
and my consequent unconsciousness of any public, 
that made me so frankly communicative." What- 
ever the source of Lowell's frank communication 
of his most intimate moods, whatever his motive 
in printing, it is certain that it is precisely this 
quality which gives such direct and compelling 
pathos to " She Came and Went," " The Change- 
ling," "The First Snow-Fall," "The Wind- 
Harp," " Auf Wiedersehen," "After the Burial," 
'' The Dead House," and " The Darkened Mind." 
It is the same sincerity, a little less poignantly 
personal, a little more fully universalized, that 
informs the deeper harmonies of the " Commem- 
oration Ode " and " Agassiz." Compare such 
poems as these with anything of Poe's or W^hit- 



LOWELL'S POETRY 259 

man's, with the cooler artistry of Bryant or Long- 
fellow, with the more facile singing of Whittier, 
even with the most spontaneous poetizing of 
Emerson, and in a certain fervor of sincerity 
Lowell's moves us more deeply and humanly if 
not with the finest aesthetic charm. 

A second trait of his best poetic work, only a 
little less characteristic than his sincerity, was the 
amount of mind that lay back of it. Lowell him- 
self noted in certain poets " That Ben Franklin 
quality . . . which one recognizes also in Shake- 
speare. In such natures the imagination seems 
to spire up like a Gothic cathedral over a prodi- 
giously solid crypt of common sense." Lowell 
himself had much of this '* Ben Franklin quality," 
and even the analogy with Shakespeare is not 
inapt ; for in variety and versatility, if not in 
degree, Lowell had something of the Shake- 
spearean mind, — more of it, at any rate, than 
any other American poet. So, despite his scat- 
tering of inapposite thoughts, despite his wan- 
nesses of wonder, we are likely to find in his best 
poetry, especially in his later life, a solid core of 
intellectual nutriment, — a meaning, — some- 
times, as in " Turner's Old T^m^raire," a poetic 
meaning. 

A third life-giving trait of Lowell's poetry was 
the consistent ideality, which was both root and 
branch of his sincerity and of his abounding in- 



260 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

tellectnal life. With all his perturbations and 
harassings of doubt no American poet, not even 
Emerson or Poe, fulfilled his poetry more power- 
fully than Lowell with the spiritual sense of life. 
His lively perception of the invisible realities 
never flagged, whether he were dealing with the 
life of men, — around him in society or recorded 
in old books, — or with the sights and sounds, 
the moods and mysterious beauties, of Nature. 

In certain of his pieces he is more nearly " The 
American Wordsworth" than Bryant or than 
any other of our poets. None other was so sensi- 
tive to impalpable impulses from vernal woods, 
or found so readily spiritual food in the " balan- 
cing of a yellow butterfly over a thistle-bloom." 
But there was in Lowell's love of nature some- 
thing of a pagan sensuousness that marks a dif- 
ference. He " was born," he writes, " to sit on a 
fence in the sun," he felt the earth " thrill under 
his feet," in a way that one suspects even Words- 
worth was not very familiar with. Hence came 
a lack of the high imaginative unity of spiritual 
preoccupation that is the secret of power in 
Wordsworth. But hence came, too, that smack 
of native earth, that echo of bird songs, that 
make so many lines of Lowell's poetry cling to 
American memories with the keen freshness 
and fragrance of a New England spring. 

But not sincerity, mind-work, ideality, love of 



LOWELL'S POETRY 261 

nature —neither one nor all together — will make 
a man a good poet. They will be likely to make 
him a good man, but a good poet he will not be 
unless he have the last indispensable gift of poetic 
style, a certain inevitable way of putting things, 
the knack of weaving a texture of words that 
may have a lively beauty and a real existence of 
its own. Lowell had this gift, but intermittently ; 
it is shown multitudinously in lines and passages, 
rarely through entire poems. 

The quality of Lowell's poetic style at its very 
best is of a pithy and noble grandiloquence. It 
has a pregnancy that has always been one of the 
characteristic marks of English as contrasted 
with French or Italian poetry. It has a certain 
savor of scholarship, particularly of seventeenth- 
century scholarship, yet seldom does the cryptic 
inkhorn term obtrude itself. In such a poem as 
" Agassiz," — which the present writer is some- 
times disposed to consider Lowell's very best in 
the grand manner, — the verse rolls along in a 
grave, majestically cadenced stream rising to a 
climax in the strophe beginning 

" I cannot think he wished so soon to die," 

that in the beauty of " high and passionate 
thoughts to their own music chanted " need fear 
comparison with no memorial poetry in the 
world. And in "The Cathedral," side by side 



262 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

with undissolved particles of prose, are lines and 
passages of pure and perfect poetry that give no 
uncertain taste of the quality of the poet Lowell 
might have been under more favoring stars, in 
an age more given to creating beauty and less to 
lecturing about it. How fresh is the image of 
these lines : — 

" No rose, I doubt, was ever,^ like the first, 
A marvel to the bush it dawned upon ; " 

how satisfying the large Cowleyesque cadence 
and accent of these, — 

" I think man's soul dwells nearer to the east, 
Nearer to morning's fountains than the sun;" 

how thrilling the invocation to Freedom, — 

" O mountain-born, sweet with snow-filtered air 
From uncontaminate wells of ether drawn 
And never-broken secrecies of sky." . . . 

Looking at Lowell's poetical achievement in 
the round, one thing is especially remarkable : it 
was best when least subjective ; when instead of 
throwing the rein upon the neck of his fantasy, 
he curbed it and brought into harmonious play 
the aptitudes of the critic and humanist which 
were the other half of his genius. Considered by 
the approved standards of poetic art, his occa- 
sional poems, whether threnodies for Harvard 
youth slain in the war for nationality, for Queen 

^ The comma is in all texts. 



LOWELL'S POETRY 263 

Mercedes too early dead, or bookish pieces in a 
suave, frankly academic vein like " The Night- 
ingale in the Study " or the lines to Longfellow 
on his birthday, outweigh all his moody lyric 
musinsjs. And the flavor of the man was more 
fully expressed in them than in the pieces 
wherein he labored to express it. 

The multiplicity of Lowell's poetic manners 
has a little confused our judgment of his work, 
but as time goes on the winnowing suffrage of 
the years makes his work as a satirist, the mood 
in which he began, and to which he returned 
intermittently throughout his life, seem his most 
enduring poetic expression. With his yearning 
to be the poet of wonder, of the mystical moods 
of Nature and of the Soul, Lowell seems to have 
taken his satirical writing less and less seriously. 
Yet it may be doubted whether anything of his 
in the field of pure poetry has quite the poetic 
vitality of his excursions into the field of what 
may be called applied poetry. Little as he liked 
to be reminded of it in his later years, Lowell 
was the author of the " Biglow Papers," and 
it is as the author of the " Biglow Papers " 
that he is likely to be longest remembered. It 
is needless to add anything here to what has al- 
ready been said of the " Biglow Papers," of 
the first series and of the second. In variety, 
unction, quotability, ethical earnestness, humor, 



264 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

wit, fun, even in pure poetry and pathos, they 
stand quite by themselves in American litera- 
ture. Criticism cannot touch them. They are 
vital with the whole quality of a true man, and 
the patriotic emotion of a true people. For fifty 
years they have furnished delightful reading to 
thousands of American and English readers, 
and they will continue to furnish it. For even 
though the political allusions in them grow more 
and more misty with the years, their deep na- 
tional quality, their literary salt, their tough 
homespun texture, will keep them from dusty 
corruption. 

It is needless to worry about what Lowell 
might have been as a poet under more propitious 
skies, with a little more single-mindedness, a 
little less variety of occupation. Clough's sug- 
gestion that Lowell's magnum opus should be 
an American " Canterbury Tales " was a shrewd 
one, but " Fitz Adam's Story," interesting as it 
is, is not conspicuous for narrative gift ; and, in 
the long run, that a poet does n't do it is pretty 
fair working proof that he can't do it. So it is 
idle to prepare for Lowell an obituary in his 
own mock American style : " He wrote no epic, 
but if he had, etc., etc." 

His more ambitious poems were a source of 
spiritual stimulus and refreshment to thousands 



LOWELL'S POETRY 265 

of his contemporaries, and if not many of them 
have eternalizing form, a few of them will last 
by sheer force and elevation of mood, and more 
will doubtless continue long to quicken the 
imagination of American youth in the schools, 
who can approach the whole body of Lowell's 
poetry in something of a freshly contemporary 
spirit. 

So by a devious road we come to the conclu- 
sion of the whole matter. If, by the gradual dif- 
fusion of Lowell's first poetic impulse, and its 
application in other affairs of a various life, it 
lost a little in pure immortalizing intensity, yet 
the " Commemoration Ode " and the " BIglow 
Papers " have a valid and perdurable claim to 
remembrance ; and the place of the man him- 
self as one of the poets-militant below is secure. 
And if, as Lowell wrote in one of his note-books, 
the poet's business is to make heroes as well as 
sing them, none has performed it better. 



CHAPTER VIII 

LOWELL'S PROSE 

1. His Talk. 

Lowell's talk was never prosy. Leslie 
Stephen, who had every opportunity of know- 
ing, has recorded that save perhaps on the sub- 
ject of his astonishing faculty for the detection 
of Jews, Lowell could not possibly come within 
measurable distance of boring ; and in the 
offices of his publishers there is still a tradition 
that he never called on the most casual business 
without leaving behind him something quotable 
that would be passed from mouth to mouth for 
days. Yet his talk was singularly of a piece 
with his letters and his essays. In a real and 
underogatory sense Lowell *' talked prose." So, 
in dealing with his " spontaneous, enthusiastic, 
and versatile " expression, — to employ a con- 
venient formula which, however it may fit 
American literature as a whole, is strikingly 
applicable to Lowell, — it will be of advantage 
to consider it when most spontaneous, most 
enthusiastic, most versatile, — in short, in his 
familiar talk. 



LOWELL'S PROSE 267 

All his life long Lowell was a great talker. In 
youth a certain assertive shyness that was char- 
acteristic of him seems to have made him now 
restively silent, now feverishly voluble. But this 
over-emphasis wore off as he saw more of the 
world. He was seldom quite easily himself in 
large companies, but in a small circle of con- 
genial friends he was a perfect master of the 
conversational instrument. 

The idiosyncrasy of Lowell's talk was its flex- 
ibility. Unlike most great Anglo-Saxon talkers 
of his sex, he had a fine sensitiveness to his 
hearer's feelings. " Lowell," says Leslie Stephen, 
" was so quick at knowing what were the danger- 
ous topics, that I do not think he could ever have 
given pain unless he felt it to be a duty." As 
he grew older, the lecture habit grew upon him, 
and he came to have at times, as an English 
friend complains, "an airy omniscience," "a mi- 
nute and circumstantial way of laying down the 
law." Yet for him talk never ceased to mean con- 
versation, lively with give and take, picturesque 
with curious allusion and racy phrase, pliant 
and cordial with sincere friendliness, and never 
marred by a mean or an ill-natured judgment. 

When in the mood for it with a congenial com- 
panion, Lowell could talk in paragraphs, pa- 
tiently endeavoring to thread the difficult needle 
of truth. But his more characteristic manner in 



268 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

conversation, as in letter writing or essay writing, 
was discursive and vivid. He was never able to 
resist the seduction of the fantastic, the paradox- 
ical, the daring. He abounded in quips and 
cranks, recondite jokes and puns. His applying 
to an unintelligent person "the quadrisyllabic 
name of the brother of Agis, King of Sparta," 
which after much research was discovered to have 
been Eudamidas, seems to have been a jest of 
a type he was fond of, but too elaborate to be 
fairly typical of his conversational style. Long- 
fellow records in his "Journal" that at Lowell's 
supper to Thackeray the latter said in bidding 
his host farewell, " We have stayed too long ! " 
" I should say," replied Lowell, " one long and 
two short, a dactylic supper." Some of his wit- 
ticisms were reminiscent of his reading rather 
than strictly original. He wrote in a letter of a 
talk between Dr. Holmes and Anthony Trollope, 
that " it was pelting a rhinoceros with seed 
pearls." Leigh Hunt, in his " Autobiography," 
had recently written of Charles Lamb's dealing 
with an hypothetical antagonist of similar stamp 
that he would have " pelted his head with pearls." 
Such instances are numerous, yet there is no 
hint of conscious or laborious artifice in their use. 
Lowell's good things, to quote Leslie Stephen 
once again, " came up as spontaneously as bub- 
bles in a spring," and it is in this quality that 



LOWELL'S PROSE 269 

the unity of his oral and written prose becomes 
most apparent. Expression with him always 
meant improvisation, depending for its effective- 
ness on the stimulus of the occasion, the fervor 
or animation of his mood. 

Perhaps the most explicit single account of 
Lowell's talk that has been preserved is that by 
an anonymous writer in the "Atlantic Monthly "^ 
who had known the Lowells at home and saw 
something of them in Paris. " Mr. Lowell," she 
says, *' was more fond of talking than any one 
else I ever knew." In the course of the talks 
Lowell seems to have caught the light on nearly 
every facet of his many-faceted mind. He dis- 
played an astonishingly minute and accurate 
familiarity with all the details of Parisian local 
history ; he discoursed at large, as was his wont, 
upon the Jews, and his own peculiar gift of 
detecting hidden strains of Hebrew blood in 
the most unlikely persons; he extemporized in 
French a witty fantastic letter from a French 
doll to an English doll. Yet underneath this 
medley of learning, paradox, and wit, the listener 
was conscious of the fine single-mindedness, the 
incorruptible Puritanism of the man. Moral 
judgments were constantly uppermost in his 
mind, and he was always rapping out some terse, 
unconventional, sincere expression of righteous 
1 For January, 1897. 



270 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

feeling. Mr. Barrett Wendell has told of going 
as an undergraduate to call upon Lowell, unwit- 
tingly on an evening when he had heard of the 
death of an old and dear friend, and of hearing, 
or, as it were, overhearing from Lowell a series 
of deep musings upon death that had something 
of the solemn sentiment, the elegiac cadence of 
a great prose threnody by Browne or Bossuet. 

In short, in Lowell's conversation, as in all 
his expression, we discover the essential puzzling 
antinomy between the simple transparent nature 
of the man and his complex and willful intellect. 
Finally to characterize his talk we shall have 
to resort to manifold comparison. Perhaps we 
shall describe it most exactly if we say that to 
something of the vast and ready learning of 
Macaulay's, the homely wisdom of Franklin's, 
the nimble-footed, sweetly-stuttered fantasy of 
Lamb's, it united a human friendliness, a moral 
sincerity, all its own. This is not saying that 
Lowell's talk as talk was better than that of any 
or all of these famous talkers. Very likely in a 
competitive conversation it would have suffered 
precisely from its variety of modes, its lack of 
permanent pose, of artful manner. Yet Lowell's 
talk was always his talk, and always good talk. 
If we may adapt to our uses Bronson Alcott's 
pleasant formula and suppose that Shakespeare 
had visited Cambridge at any time between 1856 



LOWELL'S PROSE 271 

and 1872, no lover of Lowell can doubt for 
whom he would have inquired first. 

2. His Letters. 

..." Letters, so it seems to me, 

Our careless quintessence should be, 

Our real nature's careless play 

When Consciousness looks t' other way ; 

Not drop by drop, with watchful skill, 

Gathered in Art's deliberate still, 

But life's insensible completeness 

Got as the ripe grape gets its sweetness. 

As if it had a way to fuse 

The golden sunlight into juice." 

This was Lowell's ideal of the perfect letter, 
and in his familiar correspondence we find pre- 
cisely this careless, undeliberate play of his real 
nature. As in his talk there was always a nice 
attention to the physical form of speech, to tone 
and modulation, so in his letters we have a re- 
gard for physical appearance that at first seems 
a little artificial. The balance of the page is 
carefully considered, there are turn-over catch- 
words at the bottom of each page, and when 
writing to literary persons, he affects the long 
" f ." But this is no more than the natural retro- 
spective instinct of the gentleman and scholar. 
In the substance of his letters there is little 
trace of artifice. They were written always at 
top speed, never copied, and they show singu- 



272 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

larly few corrections or interlineations. So the 
letters, a little more considerate than his talk, 
a little less elaborate than his essays, contain 
perhaps the very best of Lowell. 

As Lowell's talk was coti versation, so his let- 
ters were correspondence. They were written not, 
as so many classic bodies of English letters have 
been, to afford the pleasure of self-expression to 
a cloistered scholar like Gray, a wistful poet 
like Cowper, or an eccentric recluse like Fitz- 
Gerald. They were written, rather, because of 
some actual occasion for writing, to answer or to 
ask questions, to communicate news and views, 
to afford pleasure to the recipient by some elab- 
orate epistolary jest. Yet Lowell poured himself 
out in them as he always did in any form of 
composition when once his pen was fairly going. 
His learning, his political interests, his love of 
nature, his poetic vision, his likes and dislikes, 
his human hopes and fears, all are there, and 
everywhere are beams of his inextinguishable 
humor and flashes of his irrepressible wit. 

Lowell's letters have been so chief a part of 
the texture of this book that it is needless to 
give here any further specimens of their various 
quality. Yet to show Lowell's happy mastery of 
the occasional letter as a form of composition it 
may be worth while to pause over this little note 
of introduction : — 



LOWELL'S PROSE 273 

Cambridge, August 5, 1860. 

My dear Hawthorne, — I have no Masonic 
claim upon you except community of tobacco, 
and the young man who brings this does not 
smoke. 

But he wants to look at you, which will do 
you no harm, and him a great deal of good. 

His name is Howells, and he is a fine young 
fellow, and has written several 'poems in the 
"Atlantic," which of course you have never 
read, because you don't do such things yourself, 
and are old enough to know better. 

When I think how much you might have pro- 
fited by the perusal of certain verses of some- 
body who shall be nameless — but, no matter ! 
If my judgment is good for anything, this youth 
has more in him than any of our younger fel- 
lows in the way of rhyme. 

Of course he can't hope to rival the Consule 
Planco men. Therefore let him look at you, and 
charge it 

To yours always, 

J. R. LOWELL.I 

How perfect in its way this is ; and what could 
be more charming than this other written to a 
young lady who had contracted an engagement 
of marriage in a house where Lowell was stay- 

^ Letters, ii, 52. 



274 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

ing, and who in writing to announce it to him 
had said she fancied he had seen what was going 
on: — 

" Because you had entered into the great con- 
spiracy of nature, you thought everybody must 
suspect. You feared each bush an officer. But 
no. I was blinder than a bat — for a bat is blind 
only at the behest of alliteration, and I was so 
through the whole alphabet impartially. No, you 
held your secret as tight as a rosebud." 

If we compare Lowell's letters, as we justly 
may, with the best-beloved letters in the lan- 
guage, — Walpole's, Gray's, Cowper's, FitzGer- 
ald's, and Stevenson's, — some significant differ- 
ences will appear. Considered objectively as a 
body of letters, Lowell's lose a little in effective- 
ness as compared with the others precisely 
through their lack of the qiiasi-artistiG unity 
that comes from the consistent attitude toward 
life held by a perfectly integrated personality, 
even, or perhaps one might better say, especially, 
if it be a little eccentric as the world counts 
eccentricity. The recluse, the hermit, the exile 
for health, have the advantage of forming more 
secure conclusions, of dwelling upon them more 
uninterruptedly, of envisaging them more vividly, 
than the man in a world of men can hope to do. 
With all Lowell's talk of his Cantabrigian seclu- 
sion, his solitary bookish hours at Elmwood, he 



LOWELL'S PROSE 275 

was never in the least a recluse or a hermit, nor 
did he have the temperament of one. So we shall 
never find in Lowell's letters quite the edge, the 
unity, the enduring distinction of Gray's, of 
FitzGerald's, or of Stevenson's. Nor have they 
quite the attraction of the easy amused world- 
liness that has immortalized Walpole's. In 
tone and quality, they are perhaps nearer to 
Cowper's than to any of the others. As edited 
by the discreet hand of Mr. Norton, they do not 
show quite the mutuality, the reflection of the 
correspondent, that is one of the chief charms of 
Cowper's correspondence ; despite their affec- 
tionateness, they are hardened a little by the 
greater prevalence of wit than humor ; nor do 
they have quite the same unassuming, unsur- 
passed felicity of phrase. But in half-tender, 
half -playful sentiment, in variety and ease, they 
are fully equal to those of the poet of Olney. 

In thoroughly assimilated, unobtrusive learn- 
ing, in the vigorous expression of sound views on 
contemporary questions of importance, Lowell's 
letters need fear comparison with no letters what- 
ever ; while in view of this learning and of the 
public eminence of the writer their sudden sallies 
of boyishness are peculiarly engaging. If they 
have not quite the chance of becoming classic 
that FitzGerald's have, or Stevenson's, they are 
at any rate likely to last as long as any others 



276 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

that have been written since Cowper's day. 
They have a special claim upon American read- 
ers as the finest and most delightful body of let- 
ters yet written in this country. 

3. His Essays, 

As one studying Lowell's prose ascends the 
scale of formality from his talk to his letters, 
and comes at last to his literary essays, the im- 
pression of the continuity of it all constantly 
deepens. Lowell had a way of uttering a good 
thing in talk, then jotting it down in his note- 
book, then writing it to a correspondent, and 
then using it, a little filed and polished, in what- 
ever he happened to be composing at the time. 
One has in consequence a marked sense of 
parallelism in thought and phrase in the three 
modes of his prose expression. But the real bond 
of connection lies deeper than that. It is rather 
that the essays in his most characteristic vein 
have precisely the quality of witty and learned 
extemporization, ingenuous, undeliberate, sin- 
cere, that distinguished his talk and his corre- 
spondence. Pretty nearly everything in his es- 
says " seems," as he finely says of Dryden's prose, 
" struck off at a heat, as by a superior man in the 
best mood of his talk." 

As with Lowell's poetry, so with his prose, the 
impression of hastiness which it gives comes from 



LOWELL'S PROSE 277 

the actual fact of its rapid composition. He is 
continually complaining in his letters that he is 
barely *' keeping abreast of the press," or "writ- 
ing with the Devil (printer's) at his elbow ; " 
and this account of the matter is very little ex- 
aggerated. His preliminary studies for an essay 
were laborious and long, but he wrote with great 
speed, almost always with the sense of external 
pressure, and he had very little opportunity, and, 
one suspects, very little taste, for revision. 

The most obvious result of this manner of 
composition is a lack of firmness of outline that 
is a very serious flaw in his literary essays con- 
sidered as works of prose art. Take his " Less- 
ing " as a perfectly typical essay, and look at its 
ordonnance. It will be found to be made up of 
five sections, as follows : — 

I. One page ; the gaucheries of biographers in 
general with special relation to Burns. 

n. Eight pages ; a violent transition to a dis- 
cussion of the absurd lack of proportion, style, 
and humor in German Literature. 

III. Eight pages ; a slightly easier transition 
to the faults of Herr Stahr as a biographer. 

IV. Two and one half pages ; the faults of 
Mr. Evans as a translator. 

V. Fifty pages ; Lessing. 

This loose and roundabout structure is not ex- 
ceptional. It is the rule in nearly all of Lowell's 



278 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

essays, and it finds a curious parallel in the im- 
perfectly syllogistic texture of his prose. Of 
the rhetorical quality of coherence, whether of 
sentences or of paragraphs, he was habitually 
negligent. One must not insist upon this too 
pedantically. Yet there is no more enduring 
quality of good prose than closeness of grain, 
and the writer who neglects to strive after it 
does so at his peril. Looking still more closely 
at the fibre of his writing, one finds a surprising 
number of small cacophonies — hard processions 
of consonants, series of words ending in " ly," 
etc. — that could never have survived painstak- 
ing revision. Nor is it at all likely that Lowell's 
cooler eye would have looked with favor upon 
numerous defects of taste like that reference to 
" the shot that shattered the forecasting brain 
and curdled the warm sweet heart of the most 
American of Americans." 

In an occasional review article in a magazine, 
such indiscretions are not especially sinful, and 
Lowell's contemporary repute did not suffer by 
them ; but it is precisely this lack of lucid order 
and labor of the file that will keep him, perad- 
venture, from being numbered among that little 
company of writers of classic English prose, to 
which his great gifts should have gained him 
entrance. 

But rather than linger over the recapitulation 



LOWELL'S PROSE 27^ 

o£ Lowell's wrongdoings in prose, it will be 
more fruitful to consider their genesis, their re- 
lation to the whole constitution of his mind, and 
to the admirable qualities of his writing.^ 

The causes of Lowell's failure in close prose 
structure were many, and intricately related. 
The opposition of his professorial and editorial 
pursuits had something to do with it. Most of 
his essays were patched together from old lec- 
tures and so, while they gained somewhat in full- 
ness of learning and closeness of reference, lost 
a little in the integrity that comes from fresh 
and keen conception. The habit of turning aside 
from the right line of progress to cull the elegant 
extract, which he contracted in his youth, was 
certainly fostered by his practice of discursive 
lecturing, and only partially corrected by the 

1 Any one who wishes to consider further the case of the 
advocatus diaholi against Lowell has but to refer to a volume 
by Prof. William Cleaver Wilkinson, entitled " A Free Lane© 
in Life and Letters," published in 1874. Professor Wilkinson 
approaches Lowell's writings with something of the temper of 
a reviewer of the eighteenth century. Along with many jejune 
reflections and eccentric half truths will be found some shrewd 
observations and a striking roll-call of Lowell's literary pec- 
cadilloes. The best answer is to read a page, any page, of 
Lowell's discursive, energetic, vital prose. Lowell himself 
never perused the professor's book. If he had, he might have 
corrected many inconsistencies and a few solecisms in his col- 
lected works, but he would, I doubt, have experienced no very 
deep conviction of sin. 



280 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

development of his editorial instinct. His very 
sense of humor was sometimes a hindrance to 
him, for only a vigorous artistic faculty, or a 
present inspiration of the uttermost momentum, 
can keep an exuberant wit from lapsing into the 
grotesque and irrelevant. 

But deeper than any of these things as a 
cause of ill-coordinated structure was a certain 
characteristic impatience of mind, — a desire to 
have done with the facts and get at the truth of 
the matter. Time and time again, Lowell begins 
an essay with the customary biographical narra- 
tive, pauses to note a significant fact, is fired by 
it to expatiation, passes to the end of the matter 
in some half dozen pages of lively, eloquent 
writing, and then returns resignedly to take up 
the matter in hand. It rarely occurs to him to 
leave anything out. 

It is a curious fact, darkly connected with an- 
other upon which I have earnestly insisted in 
speaking of our author as a man, that the lack 
of unity in Lowell's characteristic prose is in- 
tellectual rather than emotional. Nearly all of it 
has the unity of feeling that might be expected 
in the work of a man of simple, sincere character, 
however complex and willful his intellect, how- 
ever elusive his temperament. In the essays like 
" My Garden Acquaintance," " On a Certain 
Condescension in Foreigners," or "A Good 



LOWELL'S PROSE 281 

Word for Winter," written out of himself, not 
out of books, tliere is a close imaginative coher- 
ence that leaves no ground for even the most 
meticulous critic to carp. Furthermore, when- 
ever Lowell was compelled by the exigencies of 
occasion to bridle the play of his intellect, to 
subdue his almost feminine eagerness, his license, 
to the personal note, to direct it in a given chan- 
nel, his prose at once gained in quality. It is 
significant to note in some parts of the writings 
of Parson Wilbur, and in some other passages 
of Lowell's work, like the fictitious speech of 
Johnson in "The President on the Stump," 
where his prose is steadied and restrained by 
being made dramatic and considered, rather 
than lyrical and spontaneous, how it wins sud- 
denly the accent and rhythm of the very best 
English prose. In such passages Lowell's prose 
escapes all the familiar faults of the improvisa- 
tore, and becomes what it might always have 
been, close, pregnant, and wholly noble dis- 
course. The conditions of oral delivery, too, 
acted as a restraining influence, and some parts 
of his speeches are more admirable as prose than 
any but the very best of his essays. 

But here again we are in danger of uttering 
that idle lament for what might have been. The 
Lowell that voiced himself through a lifetime 
of prose expression in talk, in letters, in essays, 



282' JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

was too full and rich a man, of too much genius, 
to be judged wholly by formal standards. His 
talk, as has been said, was his talk, and his writ- 
ten prose was his prose, with very vital qualities 
of its own. 

Savory is perhaps the best word wherewith to 
describe the quality of Lowell's prose style. In 
part this savoriness is a matter of diction. Low- 
ell was in the best sense a true lover of words ; 
and he used them with a smack of delight that 
gives a charming fresh youthf ulness to his most 
mature writing. In his letters he says " a word 
that clings to the memory is always a good word 
— that 's the way to test them," and, as it hap- 
pened, there were few words that touched his 
memory that did not cling to it. He shared an 
old belief now a little out of fashion that there 
is no word in the language that will not express 
some particular idea, some nuance of meaning, 
better than any other word. Yet he seldom fell 
into the fallacy of trying to find a meaning for 
his words. With him the meaning came first, 
and the word tumbling after. So he poured them 
out, big words, little words, racy monosyllables 
of popular speech, terms of art, inkhorn terms, 
hoary sesquipedalians big with old meanings ; and 
sometimes if he could not find in his memory the 
word he wanted he would make one for the oc- 
casion. Hence came in his best prose that union 



LOWELL'S PROSE 283 

of vitality and antiquarianism in diction which 
is one of its chief charms. Side by side with 
subtilely allusive phrases that thrill the ripe 
reader with gleaming memories of old and far- 
off authors, will be found some breezy vocable 
of the street that strikes a sudden gust of fresh 
air across the page. 

The defect of this quality was that Lowell 
lacked quite the " choiceful sense " to make it 
constantly effective. He was capricious in this 
as in everything else. Sometimes the breezy 
vocable was too breezy and blew the decent dra- 
peries of convention about too wantonly, some- 
times the prodigious sesquipedalian was too 
obviously dragged in by its inky heels. Words 
like " quintessentialized," a kind of which he is 
fond, bring the reader up with too short a turn. 
In his essay on " Witchcraft," for example, Lowell 
wrote, " You may see imaginative children every 
day anthropomorphizing in this way." How sad 
it is — to say nothing of the awkward jingle of 
" day " and " way " — how sad it is to see little 
children anthropomorphizing I 

But, after all, such indiscretions are not very 
common in Lowell's prose. Habitually his dic- 
tion is full and flexible, with a finely sensitive 
way of taking color, catching fire from the mat- 
ter in hand. In his essay on Milton, for in- 
stance, note how he absorbs unction from his 



284 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

subject, takes far more phrases and images from 
the classics than is his wont, and writes with an 
imaginative magniloquence wholly worthy of the 
theme. Or see how in " A Great Public Charac- 
ter " he catches the grave, nobly measured ac- 
cent of the prose of an earlier generation. How 
nice the choice of words, how musical the ca- 
dence, how classic the note of these sentences : 
" I have seen many old men whose lives were 
mere waste and desolation, who made longevity 
disreputable by their untimely persistence in it ; 
but in Mr. Quincy's length of years there was 
nothing that was not venerable. To him it was 
fulfillment, not deprivation ; the days were 
marked to the last for what they brought, not 
for what they took away." 

Another great spring of savoriness in Low- 
ell's essays was their wit. Lowell's wit was not 
a mere jest-making faculty ; it was, rather, 
like the wit of Donne, the exuberant play of a 
subtle, ingenious intellect, filling the man's work 
everywhere, not merely with jests, but with 
quaint conceits, odd analogies, elaborately hu- 
morous similitudes, " brave translunary things." 
A good deal of his working wit lay in referring 
to common objects in a poetic diction resem- 
bling that of the eighteenth century ; thus white- 
wash became "candent baptism," Holland gin, 
"Batavian elixir," etc. This habit sometimes 



LOWELL'S PROSE 285 

led him to elaborate the phrasing of his witty 
turns a little too much. In the essay on Mil- 
ton it is well said of the facetiousness of a 
heavy man that " he tramples out the last spark 
of cheerfulness with the broad, damp foot of a 
hippopotamus." But how much form avails in 
wit may be seen by comparing this in its femi- 
nine picturesqueness of detail with the terser, 
more masculine wit of Cowper when he wrote of 
a similar phenomenon, "Serious yet epigram- 
matic like a bishop at a ball.'* 

Perhaps the chief service of Lowell's wit to 
his prose was in providing him with figurative 
illustrations and formulas for his meaning. 
There is no prose in the language richer in 
homely, telling figures. What could be better 
than this of the beginning of an active policy 
toward the slavery question, " The nettle had 
been stroked long enough, it was time to try a 
firm grip ; " or what more startlingly, yet appro- 
priately fantastic than the conclusion of this 
passage in his " Emerson the Lecturer," where 
a paragraph of the most tender feeling, beauti- 
ful imagery, and haunting rhythm suddenly and 
characteristically concludes with a ripple of 
mocking laughter and a broad smile : — 

" And who that saw the audience will ever 
forget it, where every one still capable of fire, or 
longing to renew in himself the half-forgotten 



286 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

sense of it, was gathered? Those faces, young 
and old, agleam with pale intellectual light, 
eager with pleased attention, flash upon me once 
more from the deep recesses of the years with 
an exquisite pathos. Ah, beautiful young eyes, 
brimming with love and hope, wholly vanished 
now in that other world we call the Past, or 
peering doubtfully through the pensive gloam- 
ing of memory, your light impoverishes these 
cheaper days ! I hear again that rustle of sensa- 
tion, as they turned to exchange glances over 
some pithier thought, some keener flash of that 
humor which always played about the horizon 
of his mind like heat lightning, and it seems 
now like the sad whisper of the autumn leaves 
that are whirling around me. But would my 
picture be complete if I forgot that ample and 

vegete countenance of Mr. R — — of W , 

— how, from its regular post at the corner of 
the front bench, it turned in ruddy triumph to 
the profaner audience as if he were the inex- 
plicably appointed fugleman of appreciation ? I 
was reminded of him by those hearty cherubs in 
Titian's Assumption that look at you as who 
should say, 'Did you ever see a Madonna like 
that? Did you ever behold one hundred and 
fifty pounds of womanhood mount heavenward 
before like a rocket?' " 

It is not hard now to see how perfectly the 



LOWELL'S PROSE 287 

quality of Lowell's formal prose relates itself 
back to the quality of his talk and his letters, 
how finely it expresses his whole nature, how it 
is in itself what the man himself always wished 
above all things to be, — likable. Yet it never 
realizes all the possibilities of good English writ- 
ing. The true prose after all is Attic prose. 
Lowell's prose is never quite that. Indeed, with 
his temperament, his training, his environment, 
it could not possibly have been so. No one felt 
this more keenly than Lowell himself. No one 
has stated it more picturesquely than Hosea Big- 
low : — 

"Mistur Wilbur sez he to me onct, sez he, 
*Hosee,' sez he, 'in litterytoor the only good 
thing is Natur. It 's amazin' hard to come at,' 
sez he, * but onct git it an' you 've gut everythin'. 
Wut 's the sweetest smell on airth ? ' sez he. ' Noo- 
mone hay,' sez I, pooty bresk, for he wuz alius 
hankerin' round in hayin'. 'Nawthin' of the kine,' 
sez he. ' My leetle Huldy's breath,' sez I ag'in. 
' You 're a good lad,' sez he, his eyes sort of ripplin' 
like, for he lost a babe onct nigh about her age, 
— ' you 're a good lad ; but 't ain't thet nuther,' 
sez he. ' Ef you want to know,' sez he, * open 
your winder of a mornin' et ary season, and 
you '11 larn thet the best of perfooms is jest fresh 
air, fresh air^ sez he, emphysizin', * athout no 
mixtur. Thet 's wut / call natur in writin', and 



288 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

it bathes my lungs and washes 'em sweet when- 
ever I git a whiff on 't,' sez he. I offen think o' 
thet when I set down to write, but the winders 
air so ept to git stuck, an' breakin' a pane costs 
sunthin'." 

Lowell himself was never quite able to get 
along without breaking a pane, and it has cost 
him his position among the first masters of Eng- 
lish prose, but he remains none the less the most 
savory and most delightful of our American 
essayists. 

4. Lowell as a Critic. 

But we have dwelt perhaps too long upon the 
formal attributes and the personal flavor of Low- 
ell's prose. It is high time for us to look at its 
substance, to consider the import of his work as 
a critic of literature, and to determine as best we 
may the place of his work in the history of Amer- 
ican criticism. 

It is still a little early for any very promising 
attempt at vaticination as to the nature of Low- 
ell's most enduring fame, yet so far as one may 
judge from current allusions to his work, from 
the relative sales of his books, as well as from the 
actual quality of the books themselves, it seems 
more than likely that his work as a critic of lit- 
erature will last in greater bulk than anything 
else of his. He himself came to find in his in- 



LOWELL'S PROSE 289 

creasing devotion to the tenth Muse an increas- 
ingly satisfactory means of self-expression, and 
the critic's word is, after all, the last word, — at 
least until another critic answers him. 

In Lowell's critical writing two discrete tra- 
ditions of American criticism were for the first 
time merged. He shared largely in the classical, 
refined, scholarly ideals of Irving and Ticknor, 
so constantly aware of European judgments, yet 
with them he combined a certain enthusiastic 
gusto of appreciation, a tingling receptivity to 
the flavor of books, that marked him of a differ- 
ent race of critics. As was usual with Lowell, 
these various strains were a little discordant in 
his work. 

It is highly probable that Lowell would have 
been a better critic, whatever he might have been 
as a poet and general essayist, had he written in 
London or Paris instead of Cambridge. Could 
he have kept the freshness of curiosity of the 
small university city unimpaired, and added unto 
it the secure balance, the true catholicity that is 
"of the centre," his critical work would have 
been hard to equal. As it is, it is precisely in 
balance, and, despite the vast range of his read- 
ing, in catholicity, that he sometimes falls short 
of his best. 

Lowell's critical method was never that of 
insidious urbane circumvallation which since 



290 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

Sainte-Beuve has been increasingly the ideal of 
critical procedure. With Lowell, criticism is 
rather a matter of adventurous sallies and spec- 
tacular sword-play. At its best nothing could be 
more vigorous and refreshing ; short of its best 
it often falls into perversity and paradox. His 
extreme and unguarded statements are legion : 
" Wordsworth," he says, " was wholly void of 
that shaping imagination which is the highest 
criterion of the poet." Here he undoubtedly had 
in mind to say something that is quite true, but 
neither the sentence quoted nor the context says 
it, and as it stands it is surely the wrong thing 
to say of the author of the " Ode on the Intima- 
tions of Immortality." Or, as another instance 
of an unguarded statement saying more than was 
intended, take this : " I have since read over 
every line that Pope ever wrote, and every letter 
written by or to him ^ and that more than once." 
A critic writing at the centre could scarcely 
have said this, and it is just such expressions as 
this that sow the seeds of corruption in too many 
of Lowell's critical essays. 

Perhaps the most common field for the exer- 
cise of his critical indiscretion was the literary 
analogy, the parallel passage. His taste in phrase 
was so keen, his memory for words so retentive, 
that it needed but the same word in two passages 

1 The italics are mine. 



LOWELL'S PROSE 291 

by different authors for him to infer that there 
must be a relation between them. Thus, to take 
but a single instance from a multitude, he writes 
in his " Spenser : " — 

" Shakespeare had read and remembered this 
pastoral. Compare 

' But, ah, Maecenas is y-clad in clay, 
And great Augustus long ago is dead, 
And all the worthies liggen wrapt in lead/ 

with 

' King Pandion he is dead ; 
All thy friends are lapt in lead.' 

It is odd that Shakespeare, in his * /apt in /ead,' 
is more Spenserian than Spenser himself, from 
whom he caught this ' hunting of the letter.' " 

To say nothing of the peculiar fact that the 
second citation is not by Shakespeare at all, and 
that Richard Barnfield's authorship of the sec- 
tion of " The Passionate Pilgrim " containing 
it had already been discovered at the time Low- 
ell was writing, so good a scholar as he must 
have known that the sentiment of the verses was 
of the commonest in the fifteenth and sixteenth 
centuries, and the phrase '' lapt " or " wrapt in 
lead " of no unusual occurrence. The passage a 
little suggests Mr. Punch's classic parody of 
the nature of the damning evidence adduced in 
unfavorable reviews of the poetry of Alexander 
Smith, — 



292 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

" * Most women have no characters at all. 

Pope. 
* No character that servant woman asked. 

Smith: " 

Lowell's failure in complete critical catholicity 
was less notable than his failure to maintain per- 
fect critical discretion, yet it is still of moment 
in considering the body of his criticism. His 
blind spots and prejudices were less rather than 
more numerous than those of most men, yet in 
the case of a man like Lowell, who was by tem- 
perament so nearly the myriad-minded human- 
ist, some of his dislikes and indifferences are 
specially surprising. 

It was perhaps to be expected of a man with 
such a core of Puritanism in his character that 
he should hate all the works of Continental real- 
istic and naturalistic schools with a bitter and 
communicative hatred, but it was certainly odd 
that a critic of such flexibility of mind should 
have proved practically impervious to the germi- 
nal ideas which, whatever one may think of their 
work as art, or as a criticism of life, do give the 
writings of Balzac et Cie. a pressing claim upon 
the best attention of any serious modern critic. 
More important than this prejudice, however, 
was Lowell's indifference to a vast deal of classic 
art. As we have seen, at various times in his 
life he read and re-read Homer and Euripides 



LOWELL'S PROSE 293 

with eager delight, and he was uncommonly well 
grounded in the Latin writers. Yet to the classic 
spirit he was very imperfectly sensitive. His ac- 
quaintance with Greek sculpture and architecture 
was casual and indifferent. Hellenism, whether 
ancient or modern, had little meaning for him. 
He preferred painting to sculpture, and in paint- 
ing seems to have liked best the " literary " 
story-telling painters. Of course this merely 
amounts to saying that his preferences in all the 
arts were Gothic. A man may prefer the Gothic 
to the classic and still be a good and stimulating 
critic. But he will hardly take a place upon the 
supreme bench of the critical court unless there 
be imperishably, potently, in his memory the 
bright forms of classic art as constant touch- 
stones and exemplars. 

The truth is that in LowelPs criticism there 
is sometimes a little of the note of the amateur. 
He writes habitually more as a reader, a book- 
man, than as a professional critic. This is one 
reason why the best of his essays are so freshly 
delightful. Yet it is also the reason why the body 
of his criticism is stimulating and suggestive 
rather than convincing, and why some few of his 
studies do not so much edify as irritate. Only a 
critic with something of the temper of the ama- 
teur could have spoiled what might have been an 
excellent study of Carlyle by passages of personal 



294 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

ridicule, or in the excursus against classicism 
which forms two thirds of the paper on " Swin- 
burne's Tragedies," have left in his armor so 
large a chink for the entrance of a classic lance 
as the heavy and cryptic witticism in which 
apia-rov ^ikv vSwp is " cited as conclusive by a gen- 
tleman for whom the bottle before him reversed 
the wonder of the stereoscope, and substituted 
the Gascon v for the b in his binocular." ^ Even 
in so good an essay as his " Kousseau " a suspi- 
cion of the amateur temper can be discerned. 
That is a very subtle study of the sentimentalist 
temperament, yet it would have been better crit- 
icism if, in place of some of the expatiation on 
the sentimentality of the sentimentalists, we had 
been given a little more dry light on some of 
the actual ideas that issued from it, a little of 
the treatment that Leslie Stephen, for example, 
would have given such a subject. As it is, one 
is not made perfectly sure that Lowell had read 
all of Rousseau, as in reality he had. 

Here again, as in some other passages in these 
pages, LowelFs faults may have been too amply 
treated. In part this has come about because of 
the hesitancy which a good many writers about 
Lowell have shown in uttering their whole mind, 

1 In one of his note-books there had been ripening- for 
twenty years a note about the substitution of " Gascon v for the 
b " in " bibere est vivere." 



LOWELL'S PROSE 295 

but in a still greater degree it has sprung from 
a deep-rooted conviction that nowhere in Ameri- 
can literature is there so remarkable an instance 
of how the very greatest gifts of talent, nay, gen- 
ius itself, may fail of their full fruition through 
the slightest inattention to the hard counsels of 
perfection. 

Of Lowell's extraordinary critical virtues 
there is less need to speak at length. If his crit- 
icism is not always temperate and judicious, with 
the utmost exactitude of scholarship ; if it has 
not always the last delicacy of perception and 
refinement of style, it is, none the less, richer in 
humor, metaphor, gusto, — in short, in genius, — • 
than any other critical writing that America has 
produced ; and it is not far surpassed in these 
qualities by anything in the language. 

In his "Thoreau," Lowell says that he will 
try to give the impression of Thoreau's works 
upon him " both as a critic and as a mere reader." 
It is precisely as a mere reader that he is at his 
very best. His criticism is always most convinc- 
ing when most genial. No man was ever more 
successful in the resurrection of personality, in 
getting at the active principle of his author's 
mind, in unearthing the seeds of his thought. 
He penetrated to these things not with the dis- 
ciplined acumen of the talented critic, but with 
the sympathetic insight of genius, and it was 



296 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

with a kindred endowment of genius that he 
pould express these discoveries, not in para- 
graphs, but in epigrams. It may well be that 
no critical organon could be deduced from his 
work, that few authors are permanently " placed " 
by it, but no criticism in English is richer in 
" good things," or more lively with the voice- 
quality of dead writers. Take his " Walton," his 
"Dryden," his "Dante," — the two former are un- 
surpassed, perhaps unsurpassable, and the last, 
the most direct and solid of his essays, without a 
joke until the one hundred and tenth page, is still 
unapproached for the felicity of its dealings with 
Dante as the poet of " the magical word too 
few." Or take him on Wordsworth, whose exalta- 
tions and tediousnesses stimulated both Lowell's 
deep imaginative sympathy and his quizzicalness 
to coordinate activity, and we find an essay that 
is in the way to become classic. Or where shall 
we find a more telling union of ideal and verbal 
criticism than in that delightfully long-drawn- 
out paper on " The Library of old Authors " ? 
How variously characteristic is such a passage as 
this : — 

" To hang on the perilous edge of immortal- 
ity by the nails, liable at any moment to drop 
into the fathomless ooze of oblivion, is at best a 
questionable beatitude. And yet sometimes the 
merest barnacles that have attached themselves 



LOWELL'S PROSE 297 

to the stately keels of Dante or Shakespeare or 
Milton have an interest of their own by letting 
us know in what remote waters those hardy 
navigators went a pearl-fishing. Has not Mr. 
Dyce traced Shakespeare's ' Dusty Death ' to 
Anthony Copley, and Milton's ' Back Resounded 
Death ! ' to Abraham Fraunce ? Nay, is it not 
Bernard de Ventadour's lark that sings forever 
in the diviner air of Dante's Paradise? 

* Quan vey laudeta mover 
De joi sas alas contra '1 rai, 
Que s' oblida e s laissa cazer 
Per la doussor qu 'al cor li 'n vai.* 

' Qnal lodoletta che in aere si spazia, 
Prima cantando, e poi tace coutenta 
Dell' ultima dolcezza che la sazia.' " 

In humor, in recondite learning, in exquisite 
sensitiveness, this is Lowell at his best ; and in 
this sort none is better. 

Moreover, from the reading of no other body 
of critical essays in English can the reader learn 
so much sound literary history. His five essays, 
on Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Dryden, and 
Pope, are virtually an adequate account of the 
development of English poetry from Chaucer 
to Burns. And, finally, in no other critic will 
aesthetic perceptions and moral convictions be 
found presented with less real confusion of 



298 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

aesthetic and moral ideals, or with a more in- 
vigorating earnestness and charm. 

There is not a college in America in whose lit- 
erary courses Lowell's is not a name to conjure 
with. It is in his freshness, his vigor, his un- 
conventional ity, that he is of most service to 
the academic person who can very well cultivate 
the more formal virtues by himself. Perhaps 
in the long run the chief effect of his criticism 
will be not so much to edify and entertain the lay 
reader as to vivify the academic reader, and to 
establish a rapport between the two. Who knows, 
indeed, but that in the wise economy of nature 
the establishing of rapports is the eternal busi- 
ness of men of Lowell's stamp, seemingly so 
wasteful of their powers ? We have seen how he 
was praised in England for bringing the literary 
set into touch with the official, and it was pre- 
cisely in this making of the lion to lie down with 
the reluctant lamb that Lowell unconsciously 
was always busy. Who else has performed so 
many and such happy marriages of wit and wis- 
dom, of culture and conscience, of politics and 
poetry, of literature and life ? 

Lowell's personality seems to have entranced 
the best critics of his time, and it is still impos- 
sible to write of him without falling in some 
measure under his spell. Yet, man of letters as 



LOWELL'S PROSE 299 

he was all his life, he never wrote a book, not 
even in the sense that such an essayist as Mon- 
taigne did, and it is, perhaps, still an open ques- 
tion whether his many-sided talent, spread as it 
is through his letters, his poetry, his essays on 
literature, on politics, on manners, will prove in 
the event to have the potency of enduring life. 
Yet the case for him is hopeful. If he seldom 
wrote quite such fine prose and poetry as other 
men of a similar grade of ability, he has a salt of 
humor which is as good a literary preservative as 
anything in the world except perfection. 

At one point at the last the voice of qualifica- 
tion must be stilled. For American readers 
Lowell's work will always stand for something 
very special and apart. He was the first true 
American Man of Letters. We are proud of 
him now for what he was, for his mellow nature, 
his richly stored mind, his fertile many-sided 
intellect, his righteous soul. In the long future 
we shall, may we hope, be grateful to him for 
what he has helped us to become. 



INDEX 



[Titles of Mr. Lowell's writings, and of periodicals, are printed in italics.] 



Abolitionists, Lowell satirizes in his 
C/ass Poem, 2(5 ; begins to syui- 
pjvthize with, 32 ; becomes a whole- 
hearted adherent of their cause, 
44 ; never in the extreme wing of, 
G4 ; aids as author and editor, 74, 
87. 

Adee, Alvin A., on Spanish welcome 
of Lowell, 188 ; writes introduc- 
tion to volume of Lowell's official 
dispatches from Spain, 193. 

Adirondack Club, the, 135. 

" Africa," by Maria White, quoted, 
36. 

Agassiz, Louis, death of, 17G. 

Agassiz, quoted, 143 ; one of the 
finest of Lowell's poems, 176, 177, 
261 ; alteration in, 180. 

Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, extracts 
from letters of Lowell to, 170, 178, 
204 ; letter to, about some poems 
for the Atlantic, 234. 

Alfonso, King, of Spain, Lowell's 
friendship with, 189. 

Among my Books, first and second 
series, published, 167. 

Anti-slavery movement, Lowell's 
connection with, 32, 44, 64, 73. 

Anti-Slavenj Standard, The Na- 
tional, Lowell becomes a contri- 
butor to, 74; afterward corre- 
sponding editor, 87 ; influence of 
the work on Lowell, 91, 92 ; he 
resigns, 93. 

Atlantic Monthly, the, 136-145 ; 
Lowell first editor of, 137 ; Fields 
succeeds Lowell, 148; Lowell's 
important contributions to, 141, 
150, 151, 157, 165, 166, 215, 221; 
account in, of Lowell's talk, 269. 

" Band, the," 37 ; Lowell's promi- 
nence in, 40 ; its beneficent influ- 
ence on him, 40-44 ; its favorite 
poets, 42. 

Barnfield, Richard, author of part 
of " The Passionate Pilgrim," 291. 



Barrett, Elizabeth (afterward Mrs. 
Browning), contributes to The 
Pioneer, 58. 

Beaver Brook, Lowell's fondness 
for, 135, 235. 

Biglow, Hosea, on nature in litera- 
ture, 287. 

Biglow Papers, the, in the Boston 
Courier, 76 ; first series published, 
77 ; their characteristics, 83-85 ; 
their effect in politics, 85; con- 
tinued popularity of, 86, 87 ; a 
plea for peace, 150; second series, 
155-151) ; work by which Lowell 
is likely to be longest remem- 
bered, 263, 264. 

Biography, Lowell's ideal of, 1, 2. 

Black, C. C., one of Lowell's com- 
panions in tour of Sicily, 115, 119. 

Blaine, James G., opposed by 
Lowell, 209. 

Boston Courier, the, some of the 
Biglow Papers contributed to, 76. 

Boston Miscellany, the, Lowell's 
first prose pieces in, 52, 53. 

Bremer, Fredrika, visits Elmwood, 
89, 90. 

Briggs, Charles F., Lowell writes to, 
about his father, 8; on Mary 
Lowell's linguistic attainments, 
14 note ; a lifelong friend of 
Lowell's, 59 ; starts the Broadway 
Jownal, 68 ; Lowell writes to, 
about his own affectionateness, 71 ; 
about his domestic life, 72; about 
the duality of his nature, 82 ; 
about Fredrika Bremer, 90 ; 
about his poetical work, 95 ; joint 
editor, with Curtis, of Putnam^s 
Magazine, 102 ; Lowell writes to, 
about return to Elmwood, 145. 

Bright, John, reads Commemoration 
Ode aloud, 199. 

Broadway Journal, the, Lowell con- 
tributes to, 68. 

Brown, W. G., his "Foe of Conv 
promise " quoted, 101-163. 



302 



INDEX 



Browning, Robert, Lowell' s lack of 

interest in, 107. 
Burleigh, C. C, 68. 
Burnett, Edward, husband of Mabel 

Lowell, 173 ; member of Congress, 

231. 
Byron, Lord, not a lasting influence 

in Lowell's poetry, 2-±t). 

Cambridge (Eng.), Lowell receives 
degree of Doctor of Laws at, 178. 

Cambridgeport Woman's Total Ab- 
stinence Association, Lowell ad- 
dresses, 45, 4G. 

Carlyle, Thomas, satirized in Low- 
ell's Clans Poein, 2(3. 

Carter, Robert, associated with Low- 
ell on The Pioneer, 56 ; Lowell 
writes to, about his home life in 
Philadelphia, 08; reports Lowell's 
lectures for the Adreriit>ei\ 110. 

Catania, Lowell's adventures in, 
116-121. 

Cathedral^ The, quoted, 12 ; »ompo- 
sition of, 255, 256; beauty of, 261, 
262. 

Century Magazine, the, prints 
Phoebe, 202. 

Changeling, The, 76. 

Chapman, George, Lowell's lecture 
on, quoted, 2 ; essay on, 53. 

Ghardon Street Anti-Slavery Con- 
vention, Lowell a member of, 44. 

Child, Francis J., author of "II 
Pesceballo," 169 ; Lowell writes 
to, about rectorship of St. An- 
drews, 200. 

Church, slothfulness of the, assailed 
by Lowell, 69. 

Class Poem, Lowell's, 25-27. 

Cleveland, Grover, admired by 
Lowell, 209, 222. 

Clillord, Mrs. W. K., one of the 
closest of Lowell's English friends, 
201, 210. 

Clough, Arthur Hugh, comes to 
America with Lowell, 100. 

Commemoration Ode, 160-164. 

Conversations on Some of the Old 
Poets, published, 65 ; its import- 
ance to the student of Lowell, 66. 

Conway, Moncure D., anecdote of 
LoweU, told by, 107. 

Court in\ The, 55. 

Cowper, William, letters of, com- 
pared with Lowell's, 272, 274, 275. 

Crayon, the, Pictures J'rom Apple- 
dore printed in, 108. 

Criticism, Lowell's view of the pur- 
pose of, 65. 



Curtis, George William, on The Pre- 
sent Crisis, 79 ; joint editor, with 
C. F. Briggs, of Putnam'' s Maga- 
zine, 102; Lowell's Epistle to, 
180, 181. 

Dana, R. H., 101. 

Dante, Lowell as a teacher of, 123, 

124 ; his Dante class described by 

George E. Pond, 125; his essay 

on, 173, 237, 241, 296. 
Darwm, Mrs. W. E., Lowell writes 

to, about Whitby, 232. 
Davis, Edward M., 69, 72. 
Dead House, Tlie, quoted, 104. 
Deerfoot Farm, home of the Bur- 
netts, 213, 215. 
Democracy, the greatest of Lowell's 

English speeches, 207. 
Dial, The, Lowell's early sonnets in, 

52. 
Dogs, Lowell's, 236. 
" Don Quixote," translated and 

expounded by Lowell, 123, 

124. 
Dresden, Lowell's studies in, 113- 

115. 
Dryden, John, Lowell's essay on, 

296. 
Duulap, Elizabeth, intimate friend 

of Maria Lowell, 121. 
Duulap, Frances, governess of 

Mabel Lowell, 121 ; marries J. R. 

L., 122. See also Lowell, Frances 

Dunlap. 
Dwight, John S., contributes to Tke 

Pioneer, 58. 

" Edelmann Storg " (W. W. Story), 
17. 

Elizabethan dramatists, Lowell's 
essays on, 53. 

Elliott, Dr. S M., treats Lowell's 
eyes, 58. 

Elmwood, home of Lowell, built for 
Thomas Oliver, 3 ; described, 4 ; 
uses during the Revolution, 5; 
bought by Rev. Charles Lowell, 
5; origin of name, 12; domestic 
life in, 61 ; portion sold by J. R. 
L., 172, 173 ; his attachment to, 
179, 181. 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Lowell first 
meets in Concord, 24 ; satirized 
in Lowell's Class Poem, 26 ; im- 
mortalizes Adirondack Club in a 
poem, 135 ; poem to Lowell on hie 
fortieth birthday, 143, 144 ; notef 
Lowell's advance in workmaf 
ship, 24&. 



INDEX 



303 



Emerson the Lecturer, quoted, 285, 

2SG. 
Endi;viion, Lowell's solicitude over, 

217, 218. 
England, Lowell's first visit to, 100 ; 

other visits, 112, 175, 176, 178, 

214, 216, 229; minister to, 195- 

210 ; last visit, 232. 
Epistle to George William Curtis, 

An, 180. 
Eudamidas, Lowell's jest on, 268. 

Fable for Critics, A, composition 
begun, 76 ; published, 77 ; copy- 
right given to C. F. Biiggs, 80 ; 
its objective effect on Lowell, 81. 

" Faerie Queene," Spenser's, its in- 
fluence on Lowell, 11, 17. 

Fancy\'i Casuistry, quoted, 134. 

Field, John W., companion of Low- 
ell's in tour of Sicily, 115, 117. 

Fields, James T., succeeds Lowell 
as editor of the Atlantic MontJ-ly, 
IJrS ; encourages Lowell to write 
more Blglow Papers, 156. 

Fireside Travels, printed in Put- 
nam^s Magazine, 106. 

First Snoivfall, The, 76. 

FitzGerald, Edward, letters of, com- 
pared with Lowell's, 272, 274, 
275. 

Foster, Stephen, dissatisfied with 
Lowell's anti-slavery writing, 91. 

" Franco, Harry," pseudonym of 
Charles F. Briggs, 59. 

Freueau, Philip, his " Indian Bury- 
ing Ground," 27 ; his satire com- 
pared with Lowell's, 85. 

Frost, Rev. Barzillai, Lowell's tutor 
at Concord, 23, 24. 

Fuller, Margaret, criticises Lowell's 
early poetry, 63. 

Galilee, the Misses, of Whitby, 229. 

Garfield, James A., assassinated, 
201, 202. 

Garrison, F. J., letters from Lowell 
to, about Heartsease and Rue, 217, 
218. 

Gay, Sydney Howard, editor of 
Anti-Slavery Standard, 91 ; Low- 
ell writes to, about money mat- 
ters, 88 ; about slaveholders, 92. 

Gerry, Elbridge, once owner of 
Elmwood, 5. 

Gilder, Josepli B., collects Lowell's 
official dispatches from Spain, 
193. 

Gilder, Richard Watpon, editor of 
the Century, 202, 209. 



Graham^s Magazine, Lowell con- 
tributes to, 49, 51, 106. 

Granville, Lord, Lowell's relations 
with, 203, 205. 

Gray, Thomas, letters of, compared 
with Lowell's, 272, 274, 275. 

Great Public Character, ^,18, 284. 

Grolier Club, publishes Milton's 
"Areopagitica " with introduction 
by Lowell, 235. 

H. P., one of Lowell's signatures, 33. 

Hale, Nathan, 52. 

Harvard College, when Lowell was 
a student, 18; calls Lowell to a 
professorship, 110, 123 ; receives 
his library of old French litera- 
tui'e, 129 ; holds memorial exer- 
cises for her sons killed in Civil 
"War, 160-162 ; Lowell resigns 
professorship, 173, but later re- 
sumes teaching there, 179. 

Harvard Crimson, the, publishes 
fragmentary lecture by Lowell on 
the .study of literature, 125 ; and 
part of lecture on " The First 
Need of American Culture,*' 130. 

Harvardiana, Lowell one of the 
editors of, 21. 

Hasty Pudding Club, Lowell secre- 
tary of, 20. 

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, contributes 
to The Pioneer, 58; Lowell asked 
to write a life of, 233; letter from 
Lowell to, introducing W. D. 
Hovvells, 273. 

Hayes, Rutherford B., his election 
to the presidency, 183 ; appoints 
Lowell minister to Spain, 185, 
186. 

Heartsease and Rue, published, 216. 

Heath, John Francis, Virginian 
friend of Lowell, 44, 45, 47. 

Herrick, Mrs. S. B., Lowell writes 
to, about the Elmwood landscape, 
179. 

Heywood, Thomas, on the uses of 
poets, 228, 229. 

Higginson, T. W., one of Lowell's 
early sclioolmates, 17 ; his " Old 
Cambridge" cited, 23, 72. 

Hoar, Judge E. R., tries to have 
Lowell appointed minister to 
Spain, 184. 

Holmes, John, letter of Lowell to, 
from Rome, 99 ; with Lowell in 
Paris, 175. 

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, corre- 
spondence with Lowell, 74,75; on 
the Fable J'or Critics, 81 ; criti- 



304 



INDEX 



cisea Sir Lmtnfal, 83 ; names At- 
lantic Monthly and becomes one 
of its first contributors, 137 ; an- 
ecdote of, 15G ; poem to Lowell 
quoted, 195, 24-1; Lowell writes 
to, about the Irish troubles, 
203. 

Howe, Dr. Estes, brother-in-law of 
Lowell, 121, 135. 

Howells, W. D., 14, 133 ; first meet- 
ing with Lowell, 145 ; " Literary 
Friends and Acquaintance " 
quoted, 170, 185 ; his connection 
with Lowell's appointment as 
minister to Spain, 185, 186 ; on 
Lowell's nature, 238, 239 ; Low- 
ell's letter introducing him to 
Hawthorne, 273. 

Hughes, Thomas, on the Bigloiv 
Papers, 8G, 87 ; visits Lowell at 
Elmwood, 172 ; Lowell writes to, 
about his first experiences in 
Spain, 189. 

Hunt, Leigh, finds Lowell's poems 
always out of the London Library, 
112. 

Hutchinson, Anne, Lowell proposes 
a tragedy on her trial, 43. 

Indian Summer Reverie, An, 80. 
Indians, Lowell's early interest in, 

27. 
Irene, 50. 
Irish troubles while Lowell was 

minister to Great Britain, 202- 

204. 

James, Henry, discovers a certain 
ostentation in Lowell, 198 ; on 
Lowell's speeches, 207 ; on Low- 
ell's subtlety, 238. 

Jewett & Company, Boston pub- 
lishers, 136. 

Keats, John, " one of the old Titan 
brood," 42 ; Lowell proposes to 
write a life of, 43. 

Landor, Walter Savage, Lowell 

writes introduction to a collection 

of his letters, 19. 
Leaves from my Italian Journal, 

printed in Graham^s 3Iagazine, 

106. 
Lectures on the Enqlish Poets, 

printed without authority, 110 

note. 
Leland & Whiting, publishers of 

TZ/y Pioneer, 56, 58. 
L'Envoi : to the Muse, 140, 147. 



Leasing, Gotthold Ephraim, Low^ 

ell's essay on, analyzed, '277. 

Letters, perfect, Lowell's ideal of, 
2tl. 

" Liber Scriptorum,'' published by 
Authors' Club of New York, 124, 
125. 

Library of Old Authors, quoted, 296, 
297. 

Lincoln, Abraham, Lowell's growing 
appreciation of, 153, 154. 

London Daily News, the, Lowell 
writes articles on anti-slavery for, 
73. 

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 
journal entry about Lowell, 73 ; 
about Lowell as a lecturer, 109; 
succeeded by Lowell in Smith pro- 
fessorship at Harvard, 110. 

Loring, C. G., Lowell in law office 
of, 49. 

Loring, G. B., lines to, by Lowell, 
21 ; extracts from letters to, 
about temperance lectures, 45, 
46 ; about spiritual revelations, 
47, 48. 

Lowell, Blanche, eldest daughter of 
J. R. L., born, 70 ; his joy in, 72 ; 
her cradle, 72 ; her death, 76. 

Lowell, Rev. Charles, lather of 
J. R. L., 11, 14 ; buys Elmwood, 
5, 6 ; studies imder Dugald Stew- 
art, 7 ; character and tempera- 
ment, 8 ; marries Harriet Traill 
Spence, 9 ; memoir of, 9 note ; 
his library, 14 ; disquieted over 
J. R. L.'s college work, 22 ; loses 
property, 29 ; has paralytic shock, 
98 ; broken in mind, 105 ; death, 
145. 

Lowell, Mrs. Charles, mother of J. 
R. L., a faerie-seer, 9 ; her family, 
9, 10 ; an omnivorous readei-, 14 ; 
mentally disordered, 61 ; death of, 
88. 

Lowell, Mrs. Charles Russell, sister- 
in-law of J. R. L., 107. 

Lowell, Gen. Charles Russell, 
nephew of J. R. L., 149. 

Lowell, Frances Diinlap, second wife 
of J. R. L., married, 122; seri- 
ously ill in Spain, 191 ; ill health 
while in London, 197 ; death, 210. 

Lowell, Lieut. James Jackson, 
nephew of J. R. L., 149. 

Lowell, James Russell, liis ideal of 
biography, 1, 2 ; influences of 
childhood, 3-16; birth, 10; love 
of the outdoor world, 11, 12, 135, 
136, 260; earliest recorded letter, 



INDEX 



305 



15 ; an eager reader, 15, 19, 31, 84, 
126, 130-132, 23(3 ; his fervid sen- 
timent, 16, 20, 24, 28; pupil of 
William Wells, 17 ; enters Har- 
vard College, 18 ; his development 
there, 18, 19 ; early literary ef- 
forts marked by humor, 20, 21 ; 
an editor of Harvard iana, 21; 
neglects academic routine, 22 ; sus- 
pended, 23 ; first meets Emerson 
and Thoreau, 24 ; his Cla.ss Poem, 
25-27, 44 : perplexed about choice 
of profession, 28, 29; studies law, 
30; his humanitaiianiam, 32 ; be- 
gins to write poems for the South- 
em Literary Messenger, 33; be- 
comes engaged to Maria White, 
34 ; her influence, 35-37 ; influenf^e 
of "the Band," 37-47; essay on 
Thoreau quoted, 37-39 ; boyish 
ebullitions of fun, 40, 41 ; early 
literary plans, 42, 43, 52 note ; 
interested in anti-slavery, 32, 44, 
64, 73, 74 ; and in other reforms, 
45, 40 ; his conscious mysticism, 
47, 48, 82 ; enters law office of C. 
G. Loring, 49 ; publishes A Yearns 
Life, 49-51 ; contributes to several 
periodicals, 49, 51, 52 ; first prose 
pieces, 52; essays on Elizabethan 
dramatists, 53 ; essay on song- 
writing, 54 ; forsakes the law, 55; 
launches The Pioneer, 50; has 
serious eye trouble, 58 ; debt due 
to failure of Tlie Pioneer, 59; has 
portrait painted by Page, GO ; pub- 
lishes first series of Poems, 01 ; 
gratifying reception of the volume, 
63 ; issues Conversations on Some 
of the Old Poets, 05-07 ; marries 
Maria White, 07; does editorial 
work in Philidelphia, 08, 69; first 
daughter born, at Elm wood, 70; 
domestic happiness, 71, 72, 89; 
writes anti-slavery articles for 
London Daily News, 73; connec- 
tion with National Anii-Slavery 
Standard, 74, 87, 91-95; signifi- 
cant correspondence with Dr. 
Holmes, 74, 75; death of first 
daughter, and birth of second, 
76; prints Biylow Papers in Bos- 
ton Courier, 70; publishes four 
new volumes, 77; Poems, %econ6. 
series, 78-80 ; Fable for Critics, 
80, 81 ; Vision of Sir Launfal, 82, 
83 ; Higloiv Papers, first series, 
83-87; reaches full stature as a 
hunaorist, 83 ; birth and death of 
tliird daughter, 88; birth ol only 



son, 88; visited by Fredrika Bre- 
mer, 89 ; intellectual develop- 
ment, 90-92; improvement in 
style, 93 ; growth of poetic plans, 
94, 95 ; first trip to Europe, 98 ; 
death of his sou, 98; impressions 
of Rome, 99; returns to America, 
100 ; English literary friends, 
100 ; a writer of humorous letters, 
101, 155, 156, 230; publishes .4 
Moosehead Journal and install- 
ments of Oar Own, 102 ; death 
of Maria Lowell, 103 ; activity of 
his visionary faculty, 103 ; com- 
plex consciousness, 105 ; growth 
of his reputation, 106 ; second 
conspicuous achievement in prose, 
100, 107 ; on Browuuig's obscurity, 
107 ; prints Pictures from Apple- 
dore, and a selection of Maria 
Lowell's poems, 108; lectures 
before Lowell Institute, 109, 215; 
peculiar merit of his critical writ- 
ing, 110,295-297; appointed Smith 
professor at Harvard, 110; lec- 
tures in the West, 111; sails for 
Havre, 112 ; studies in Dresden, 
113 ; letter from Dresden, to Miss 
Loring, 113-115 ; account of ad- 
ventures in Catania, 116-121; 
makes his home with Dr. Estes 
Howe, on Professors' Row, 121 ; 
marries Frances Dunlap, 122 ; be- 
gins work as profes.sor, 123 ; hia 
Dante class, 124, 125 ; character 
of his teaching, 125, 126 ; his 
scholarship, 126-130; as a philolc- 
gist, 128 ; fou'l of talking about 
books, 133 ; first editor of Atlantic 
Monthly, 137-141 ; offends Tho- 
reau, 140 note ; bis own contribu- 
tions to the Atlantic, 141, 150, 
151, 157, 105, 160 ; member of the 
Saturday Club, 142-144 ; moves 
back to Elmwood on his father's 
death, 145 ; resigns editorship of 
the Atlantic, 148 ; becomes joint 
editor of the North A mericnn Re- 
view with Mr. Norton, 149 ; sor- 
row over the death of his nephewfv 
in the war, 149, 159; notable 
political articles, 151-154; his ap- 
preciation of Lincoln, 154 ; im- 
portance of his war poetry, 155 ; 
Biylow Papers, .second series, 155- 
159; the Commemoration Ode, 
160-164 ; literary essays in the 
North American Revie-iv, 164-167 ; 
resents England's attitude toward 
United States, 1G6 note ; publishes 



306 



INDEX 



Among my Books and My Study 
Windou'S, 1G7 ; continued poeti- 
cal activity, 168; happy in his 
friendsliips, 170, 171 ; visited by 
Thomas Hughes, 172 ; harassed 
in money matters, 172, 173; re- 
signs professorship and goes 
abroad, 173; symptoms of disease 
develop, 174, 175 ; his headquar- 
ters in Paris, the H6tel de Lor- 
raine, 175 ; made D. C. L. at Ox- 
ford, 17G ; writes Agassiz memo- 
rial poem, 17G ; made Doctor of 
Laws at Cambridge, 178 ; returns 
to Elinwood, 178 ; takes up uni- 
versity work again, 179 ; reenters 
American politics, 179 ; his politi- 
cal poetry, 181 ; presidential elec- 
tor, 183 ; urged to stand for Con- 
gress, ISi ; offered the mission to 
Austria, 185 ; appointed minister 
to Spain, 186; sails from Boston, 
187; welcomed to Madrid, 188; 
early diplomatic experiences, 189 ; 
makes an excursion to Italy, 
Greece, and Turkey, 190 ; a day's 
routine in Madrid, 190 ; elected 
member of Spanish Academy, 191 ; 
illness of Mrs. Lowell, 191 ; trans- 
ferred to England, 192 ; diplo- 
matic success in Spain, 192, 193 ; 
official dispatches published, 193 ; 
greatness of his service in Eng- 
land, 194, 195, 201, 204, 211, 212 ; 
social success in London, 197, 198; 
asked to accept Lord Rectorship 
of University of St. Andrews, 
199; opposed as " an alien," 200 ; 
takes a vacation trip on the Con- 
tinent, 202 ; troubles with Irish 
Nationalists, 202-205 ; relations 
with Lord Granville, 203, 205; 
great career as a speech-maker, 
206-209 ; Democracy his most im- 
portant addi-ess, 207 ; opposes 
Blaine and admires Cleveland, 
209 ; overwhelmed by death of 
his wife, 210 ; asked to accept 
professorship at Oxford, 210 ; re- 
turns to America, 211 ; estab- 
lished at Deerfoot Farm, South- 
borough, 213; letter-writing his 
chief occupation, 213 ; professor 
emeritus at Harvard, 214; spends 
summer (1886) in England, 214; 
delivers address at two hundred 
and fiftieth anniversary of Har- 
vard, 215 ; renewed literary activ- 
ity, 215, 216 ; again spends sum- 
mer (1887) in England, 216 ; pub- 



lishes Heartsease and Rue, 216, 
217 ; his punctiliousness in re- 
vision, 217, 218, 255, 256; de- 
clines to lecture at Harvard, 219, 
220 ; his ideality in politics, 221, 
222 ; devoted to civil service re- 
form, 222 ; his patriotism, 223, 
224; his religious belief, 224-227; 
attitude toward science, 225, 226 ; 
the poetry of life his chief incen- 
tive to faith, 227, 228 ; visits Eng- 
land again (1888), 229 ; becomes a 
prey to serious ill health, 229 ; 
delivers address at one hmidredth 
anniversary of Washington's inau- 
gural, 231 ; last visit to England, 
232 ; returns to Elmwood, 233 ; 
prepares collected edition of his 
works, 233 ; ill health increases, 

235 ; his last prose writings, 235, 

236 ; his death, 237 ; a graciously 
human man, 238 ; psychologically 
complex, 239; irrepressibly whim- 
sical, 210 ; his Puritanism, 241 ; 
warmth oif his friendship, 242 ; 
personal appearance, 243 ; his 
poetry, 245-265 ; expressive of his 
life, 246-249 ; not easy to remem- 
ber, 249, 250 ; pieces that are 
most likely to endure, 250, 251 ; 
his mystical sense, 251, 252; " too 
many thoughts and too little 
thought," 253 ; speed of composi- 
tion, 253, 254, 271 ; result of this 
haste as seen in. Sir Launfal, 254, 
255 ; indiscretions of phrase, 256, 
257, 283 ; sincerity of mood, 258 ; 
compelling pathos, 258 ; intellect- 
ual strength of his best poetic 
work, 259 ; his consistent ideality, 
259, 260 ; his love of nature, 260 ; 
his poetic style, 261; his poetry 
best when least subjective, 262 ; 
his satire, 263, 2G4 ; his talk, 266- 
270 ; abounded in jest, 268 ; his 
letters, 271-276 ; always written 
at top speed, 271 ; compared with 
the best-beloved letters in the 
language, 274-27G ; his essays, 
276-288 ; lack firmness of outline, 
277 ; marred by cacophonies, 278 ; 
causes of his failure in close prose 
structure, 279-281 ; savoriness of 
his prose style, 282, 284 ; his dic- 
tion full and flexible, 283 ; his wit, 
284, 285 ; his work as a critic of 
literature, 288-298 ; discordant 
strains in it, 289 ; extreme and un- 
guarded statements, 290, 291 ; his 
imperfect sensitiveness to the 



INDEX 



307 



classic spirit, 293 ; a note of the 
amateur in some of his criticism, 
293, 294 ; but it is rich in genius, 
295 ; and full of sound literary 
history, 297 ; the first true Ameri- 
can Man of Letters, 299. 

Lowell, Kev. Jolm, great-grand- 
father of J. R. L., 6. 

Lowell, Judge Jolm, grandfather of 
J. R. L., G, 7. 

Lowell, Mabel, second child of J. 
R. L., born, 76 ; a thoughtfiil and 
atf ectionate child, 103 ; married 
to Edward Burnett, 173 ; intel- 
lectual comradeship with her 
father, 216. 

Lowell, Maria White, first wife of 
J. R. L., early married life in 
Philadelphia, 68 ; comes to Elm- 
wood, 70 ; Fredrika Bremer's im- 
pression of, 90 ; failing health, 97, 
101 ; visit to Europe, 98 ; death, 
103 ; volume of poems prmted, 
108. 

liOwell, Mary (afterward Mrs. S. R. 
Putnam), J. R. L.'s special men- 
tor in childhood, 10, 11; a remark- 
able linguist, 14 and note ; makes 
her house in Boston an alternate 
home for Lowell, 214. 

Lowell (Lowle), Perceval, first 
American settler of the name, 
6. 

Lowell, Rebecca, oldest sister of J. 
R. L., 61 ; "queer," 105. 

Lowell, Rose, third daughter of J. 
R. L., 88. 

Lowell, Walter, son of J. R, L., 
horn, 88 ; dies suddenly, 98. 

Lowell family motto, 77. 

Lowell Institute, J. R. L. lectures 
before, 108, 109, 215. 

McCarthy, Justin, remark about im- 
prisoned Nationalists, 204. 

McKim, J. Miller, 68. 

Milton, John, incites Lowell to read 
classics, 19 ; Lowell writes an in- 
troduction to the " Areopagitica," 
235. 

Mitchell, Dr. S. Weir, 11. 

Moosehrad Journal, A, printed in 
riiiunm^s Magazine, 102, 106. 

My Lore, 50. 

My Study Wmdows, published, 167. 

Nation, The, Lowell's contributions 

to, 165, 166, 180. 
National Anti-Slavery Standard, 

the, Lowell coutributeB to, 74. 



Neal, John, contributes to The Pion- 
cer, 58. 

New England Anti-Slavery Conven- 
tion, 1844, Lowell in, 64. 

Neiv Ennland Two Centuries Ago, 
16. 

Nooning, The, a large poetic under- 
taking, proposed by Lowell, 95, 96 ; 
never completed, 97. 

North A niericun Review, the, Low- 
ell writes for, 76 ; he becomea 
joint editor of, 149 ; his important 
political papers in, 152 ; his litei> 
ary essays in, 165-167. 

Norton, Charles Eliot, Lowell writes 
to, about biographical writing, 1 ; 
accompanies Lowell in tour of 
Sicily, 115; editor ot North Amer- 
ican Reifieiv, 149; Lowell writes 
to, about editorial work, 141 ; 
about peace, 160 ; about sympathy 
with nature, 168; about friend- 
ship, 171 ; about the Agassiz ode, 
176; about London, 19ij ; his col- 
lection of Lowell's Letters cited, 
15, 46, 71, 72, 89, 92, 9G, 115, 132, 
148, 169, 177, 201, 204, 233, 252, 
273. 

Norton, Grace, Lowell vrrites to, 
about his appointment to Spain, 
180 ; and about science, 225. 

Norton, Jane, Lowell writes to, 
about his lectmring. 111; about 
his reading, 131; about the Co?«- 
rnemoralion Ode, 161 ; death of, 
187. 

Oliver, Thomas, first owner of Elm- 
wood, 3-5. 

" Opium Phantasy," by Maria 
White, quoted, 36. 

Our Literature, quoted, 231. 

Our Oivn, uncompleted poem by 
Lowell, 102. 

Ovid, considered by Ijowell the most 
poetical of Roman poets, 31, 67. 

Owen, John, publisher of Lowell's 
Poems, first series, 61. 

Oxford, Lowell receives degree of D, 
C. L. at, 176. 

Page, William, the painter, friend- 
ship with Lowell, 59 ; paints 
Lowell's portrait, 60. 

Paris, Lowell's headquarters in, 175. 

Parsons, Thomas W., contributes to 
The Pioneer, 58; On a Bust of 
Dante, 257. 

Pennsijlt^ania Freeman, the, Lowell 
an editorial writer on, 68, 69. 



308 



INDEX 



Perceval, Hugh, a pseudonym of 
Lowell's, 33. 

Peters, Hugh, a pseudonym of Low- 
ell's, 52. 

Phelps, Edward J., succeeds Lowell 
as mmister to Great Britain, 210. 

Philadelphia, Lowell's residence in, 
G7-Gi). 

Phillips, Sampson & Co., publish 
Atlantic Monthly, 136, 137. 

PhiUips, Wendell, his use of The 
Present Crisis, 79; ridiculed by 
Lowell, 151. 

Phcebe, printed In the Century, 202. 

Pictures from Appledore, 108. 

Pioneer, The, 54 ; its brief career, 
56-58 ; distinguished contributors 
to, 58. 

Poe, Edgar Allan, contributes to 
The Pioneer, 58 ; Lowell has fer- 
vid correspondence with, 60, 70. 

Poen\s, first series, published, 61 ; 
its reception, 63. 

Poems, second series, published, 77; 
contents of the volume, 78-80. 

Pond, George E., record of Lowell's 
Dante class, 124, 125. 

Present Crisis, The, 78 ; its influence, 
79, 80. 

Punch, on Lowell as an "alien," 
200. 

Putnam, George, nephew of Lowell, 
letter to, 175. 

Putnam, Mrs. S. R. See Lowell, 
Mar}'. 

Putnam, Lieut. William Lowell, 
nephew of Lowell, 149. 

Putnnm^s Magazine, Iiowell con- 
tributes to, 102, 106. 

Quincy, Edmund, associated with 
Lowell on Anti-Slavery Standard, 
91 ; death of, 187. 

Quincy, Josiah, president of Har- 
vard College, memorialized in A 
Great Public Character, 18, 284. 

Riverside Press, the, 142. 
Robinson, John P., anecdote of, 85. 
Rome, its charm for Lowell, 98, 99. 
Rusk in, John, comments on the 
Fable for Critics, 82. 

St. Andrews, University of, Lowell 
asked to accept Lord Rectorship 
of, 199. 

Satirists, all the great, have been 
Tories, 26. 

Saturday Club, the, 142-144. 

Scholarship, true, 130. 



Scott, Sir Walter, his Waverley 

novels early read by Lowell, 15. 
Scndder, Horace E., his "James 

Russell Lowell " cited, 22, 23, 99, 

100, IGl, 182. 
Shackford, W. H., one of Lowell's 

intimates at college, 19, 20, 29. 
Shakespeare, enthusiasm of Lowell 

over his sonnets, 41. 
Shaw, Mrs. Francis G., Lowell 

writes to, about table tipping, 101, 

102. 
Sicily, tour of, by Lowell, 115-121. 
Silvela, Manuel, Spanish minister 

for toreign affairs, 188. 
Smalley, George W., anecdotes of 

Lowell by, 198. 
Song-writiiig, Lowell's theory of, 

54. 
Southborough, Lowell's enjoyment 

of, 213, 215. 
Southern Literary Messenger, the, 

Lowell contributes to, 33, 49. 
Spectator, Hie, prints notable me- 
morial article on Lowell, 205. 
Spence, Harriet Traill. See Lowell, 

Mrs. Charles. 
Spence, Keith, grandfather of J. R. 

L., 9. 
" Spence negligence, the," in Low* 

ell, 10, 22, 77, 132, 239, 240. 
Spens, Sir Patrick, 9. 
Spenser, influence of, on Lowell, 11, 

17, 246 ; curious error in Lowell's 

essay on, 291. 
Stephen, Leslie, impression of Low- 
ell, 133, 135, 239, 266, 267 ; visits 

Elmwood, 2;». 
Stephen, Mrs. Leslie, LoweAl writes 

to, about his dogs, 236. 
Stevenson, Robert Louis, letters of, 

compared with Lowell's, 274, 275. 
Stewart, Dugald, one of Rev. Charles 

Lowell's teachers, 7. 
Stillman, William J., writes of Low- 
ell's friendship with William Page, 

60; editor of the Crayon, 108; 

historian of the Adirondack Club, 

135. 
Story, W. W., " Edelmann Storg," 

17 ; contributes to The Pioneer, 

58. 
Sumner, Charles, his use of The 

Present Crisis, 80; on Lowell as 

a lecturer, 109. 

Taylor, Bayard, praises Lowell's 
early verse, 51. 

Taylor, Jeremy, influence on Low- 
ell, 50. 



INDEX 



309 



Tennyson, Alfred, an early favorite 
of Lowell's, 42, 78. 

Thackeray, William Makepeace, 
fellow passenger of Lowell's from 
England to America, 100 ; much 
with Lowell in Loudon, 112. 

Thoreau, Henry D., Lowell's first 
acquaintance with, 24 ; Lowell's 
essay on, 37, 38; resents Lowell's 
revision of an article, 140 note; 
finds the Saturday Club too 
smoky, 142, 143. 

Ticknor, Howard, assistant to Low- 
ell on Atlantic Monthly, 13i>. 

Ticknor & Fields, buy the Atlantic 
Monthly, 147. 

Tories, the great satirists have been, 
26. 

Tory Row, now Brattle Street, Cam- 
bridge, 4. 

Total abstinence, Lowell's labors 
for, 45, 46. 

Traill, Robert, 9. 

Transcendentalism, 37-40. 

Trevelyan, Sir George Otto, acknow- 
ledges indebtedness to Lowell, l'J9. 

Troil, Minna, 9. 

Turner's Old Temeraire, 221, 249. 

Underwood, F. H., writes of Lowell 
as a lecturer, 109 ; proposes es- 
tablishing a literary magazine, 
136 ; becomes Lowell's assistant 
on Atlantic Monthly, 137, 139. 

United States Marjazine and Demo- 
cratic Review, sonnets by Lowell 
in, 52. 

Vandel, Philip. See Phillips, Wen- 
dell. 

Vassall, Col. John, 4. 

Vegetarianism, satirized by Lowell 
in his Class Poem, 26. 

Very, Jones, contributes to The 
Pioneer, 58. 

Victoria, Queen, her opinion of 
Lowell, 211. 

Vision of Sir Launfal, The, pub- 
lished, 77 ; its characteristics, 82, 
83 ; mystical impulse in, 247; de- 
fects of, 254, 255. 



Walpole, Horace, letters of, com- 
pared with Lowell's, 274, 275. 

Walton, Izaak, Lowell's esaay on, 
232, 296. 

Washers of the Shroud, The, 151, 
152. 

Watertown Washington Total Ab- 
stinence Society, Maria White pre- 
sents banner to, 45. 

Watts-Dunton, Theodore, on Low- 
ell's sh5Tie8s, 197 ; on his influ- 
ence in England, 212. 

Waverley Oaks, a favorite resort of 
Lowell's, 135. 

Webster, Daniel, influence on Low- 
ell of a speech by, 30. 

Wells, Judge, a powerful medium, 
102. 

Wells, William, prepared Lowell for 
college, 17, 18. 

Wendell, Barrett, first impression 
of Lowell, 123 ; hears Lowell talk 
about death, 270. 

Whist Club, of which Lowell was a 
member, 135. 

Whitby, Lowell's fondness for, 229, 
232. 

White, Abijah, father of Maria 
White, 33, 70. 

White, Maria, her family, 33; en- 
gaged to Lowell, 34; her charac- 
teristics, 35, 40; her verse, 36; 
her influence on Lowell, 37, 43; 
married, 67. See also Lowell, 
Maria White. 

White, W. A., brother of Maria 
White, 33; letter of Lowell to, 41. 

Whittier, John G., asks Lowell for 
an anti-slavery poem, 64 ; once 
editor of Pennsylvania Freeman, 
68. 

Wilkinson, William Cleaver, criti- 
cises Lowell, 279 note. 

Williams, Helen Maria, 53. 

Willis, N. P., 51,59. 

" World's Progress, The," Lowell 
writes an introduction to, 215; 
quoted, 225, 226. 

Year''s Life, A, published, 49; a no- 
table volume, 50; small sales, 51. 



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